TV Producer Makes Hollywood Wok of Fame

The general philosophy in Hollywood”a dog-eat-dog business”is that if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Well, David Latt can take the heat ‘ and he loves the kitchen! The TV producer, who has won an Emmy for ‘Hill Street Blues’ and was nominated as a producer of the pilot for ‘Twin Peaks,’ recently fell in love with writing. Not screenwriting, but writing a blog about food, of all things. At his official Web site”MenWhoLiketoCook.blogspot.com” (also as the URL guyswholiketocook.com) Latt has shared dozens of simple, gourmet recipes for everything from garlic-parsley chicken breasts and chicken soup to Italian sausage with tomatoes. He has also provided reviews of ‘fine dining, southern Rhode Island style,’ a round-up of the restaurants he tried in Providence. Latt”who lives in Pacific Palisades and is married to Michelle Satter, founding director of the feature film program at the Sundance Institute”is even a pioneer in the foodie blogosphere. He broke through the gender barrier when he became the first male embraced by TravelingMom.com. ‘I made the exception to what is otherwise an all-female network because David is a parent,’ Kim Orlando, who founded the popular Web site, tells the Palisadian-Post. ‘He understands a family’s palate, writes in a way that moms can relate to and creates recipes that are tasty and easy to prepare.’ The road to food blogging was a rambling one that began three years ago. ‘What I wanted to do is write a cookbook,’ Latt says over coffee at the local Starbucks. The cookbook deal didn’t come together, he says, ‘because I didn’t focus on one cuisine and I’m not a chef.’ Latt not only relishes fine ingredients, he delights in stretching said food across a few nights to make for tasty and healthy multiple meals. Latt explains how one can cook up a storm of roasted vegetables and roast chicken and reconfigure them to create a chicken-and- vegetables entree, a spaghetti topping, and a hearty soup with some ramen added to it. But wait, there’s more! Put those same chicken-and-vegetable bits into a bowl with whole-wheat couscous, add boiling water and olive oil, cover it, add the chopped veggies, toss it around, then add avocado and grilled shrimp, and ‘you have the most delicious salad,’ he says. ‘The trick is you have four different meals and you just cut down your budget by 80 percent.’ Latt also recycles liquid from tomatoes roasted at 350 degrees as a salad dressing. ‘One of the things my mother did was doggy-bag food,’ he says. ‘This was the basis of a next dish. [As a result] I never leave food at a restaurant. I bring home the leftover bread and I’ll make croutons or bread pudding.’ During the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America contract dispute, Latt not only became active on the picket line as a strike captain but he also began blogging his thoughts on UnitedHollywood.com. ‘We would not be reporters as much as opinion-gatherers,’ says Latt, who became smitten with the immediacy of writing online. ‘What I discovered is if you don’t like it, you can rewrite it. I now know the truth about blogs: once you start one, you can’t stop. Knock on wood, you have an audience. So I look for opportunities to write for other sites and drive traffic back to my own site.’ Among the sites he’s contributed to: PeterGreenberg.com, NYDailyNews.com, Zesterdaily.com, and Mark Bittman’s New York Times blog. But MenWhoLiketoCook.com is his bread and butter, so to speak. So what does Latt enjoy most about airing his epicurean opinions online? ‘This is going to sound sappy, but you become part of a community,’ he says. As for his physical community, ‘L.A. is a great place to learn about food and culture. My style is more Italian than anything else.’ But as a consumer, he adores Asian food, particularly Vietnamese ‘ thanks to his Jewish mother. Edna Latt had lived in what is now Laguna Woods Village for 20 years. ‘When I would visit her, I would fill her freezer with food I’d cooked so she’d have home-cooked meals,’ Latt recalled. ‘We’d also bring her to Westminster or Little Saigon and have Vietnamese food. She loved the salt-and-pepper lobster, the barbecue pork with vermicelli, and the lemon-grass chicken. Even though she was 4’10’ and weighed 100 pounds, she could out-eat all of us.’ Edna passed away in 2006. ‘Now,’ Latt says, ‘I fill the freezer for my 25-year-old son, who works long hours [as an assistant to an agent at Creative Artists Agency] and doesn’t have time to cook.’ Latt shops for fresh ingredients at the local Gelson’s and the farmers’ markets in the Palisades and Santa Monica. Among his favorite restaurants on the Westside are Il Fornaio in Santa Monica, and the Mitsuwa Marketplace on Centinela. He also digs Koreatown. As far as cities for fine dining, San Francisco is home to his favorite hamburger (Red’s Java House) and the Vietnamese eatery The Slanted Door at the Ferry Building. He finds that ‘Houston is interesting,’ but his favorite is Seattle (‘They’ve got some really good chefs there’). ‘My mother started me cooking,’ Latt continues. ‘She gave me the job of peeling the tongue. It was a Jewish home in the ’50s. You know, making chopped liver, brisket. That East Coast, Eastern European Jewish cooking.’ Born in Beverly Hills, David Latt grew up in Westwood and Baldwin Hills. His father worked in the garment business. Latt attended UCLA, where he did his undergrad work and earned his Ph.d in English. In addition to his Emmy-heralded work, Latt has produced ‘EZ Streets’ with Paul Haggis (director of ‘Crash’) and ‘Citizen Baines” with John Wells (the ‘ER’ showrunner currently producing the critically acclaimed ‘Southland’). He’s currently developing a series with director Dean Parisot (‘Galaxy Quest’). Latt’s introduction to working in the entertainment industry came courtesy of Roger Corman. ‘It was just chaos, but it was great,’ Latt says. ‘Roger was the Sundance before there was a Sundance. He gave you the shot. ‘I was teaching English and Film classes at Rhode Island College in Providence when I got a grant to come back to Los Angeles to do research at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library on the co-founder of the Quaker movement, Margaret Fell Fox. Teaching film classes, I knew about film theory, but I didn’t know anything about how films were actually made so when I was in Los Angeles, I set up a meeting with Roger Corman (king of the B-movies). My question to Roger was very simple: ‘How are movies made?” ‘Two days later, he called to say I could be the location manager on a feature being shot in southern Oklahoma, a period piece about a disaffected World War I veteran who makes his living competing in motorcycle races. The movie stared David Carradine and Brenda Vaccaro. I had no idea what a location manager did. Roger said, ‘They don’t do much.’ ‘So after getting my pick up truck serviced, off I went to Oklahoma, except the mechanic apparently hadn’t put back all the hoses and the engine blew up going up the Grapevine. A call to Roger to tell him that I couldn’t go to Oklahoma got a quick response that I was to take the next plane to Oklahoma City and meet up with the film commissioner and get started finding locations. Later, I found out that Roger had hired me because of my pick-up truck. ‘At some point in our first conversation, I had mentioned that I had a truck and Roger figured that he was paying me so little, it was cheaper to hire me and my pick up than it was to rent a truck on the location. ‘The experience was terrific although the production was a nightmare,’ Latt continues. ‘The tensions on the set were horrible. The director hated everyone. The director of photography warned the director that if he caught him outside after dark, he’d shoot him. Carradine’s dog wreaked havoc in the motel. The producer disappeared because he only took the job because he wanted to buy horses for his ranch. For me, the dysfunction was the best possible teacher. I learned how to produce on that shoot.’ A few years later, Latt got his first job in television because he was a waiter at a catered dinner for Bruce Dern’s wife. ‘The dinner was Moroccan themed so I was dressed in funny pants,’ Latt recalls. ‘I overheard one guest say he was a producer so I asked him if I could call the next day to get advice about how to become a producer. He was nice enough to introduce me to the head of personnel at Tandem Productions (Norman Lear’s company).’ When the executive learned that Latt typed 100 words per minute, she hired him to be a writer’s assistant to Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, two writers on ‘All in the Family.’ A TV career was born. For 30 years, Latt has lived in Pacific Palisades. With Satter, he has two children, both graduates of Palisades High: Franklin, at CAA’s motion picture talent department, and son Michael, a UC Davis sophomore. ‘Women like men who like to cook,’ he says, ‘and that went over well while dating.’ And in his marriage, too. Michelle lets David dominate the kitchen. ‘The truth is,’ Latt says, ‘if you have someone do it for you, why wouldn’t you?’