FOR a month now, young Hollywood has been planning a retirement party. The guest list spans the pop culture landscape -- studio executives, novelists, Academy Award winners, sitcom writers, musicians. One proposal has Martin Scorsese jumping out of a cake.
The honoree will take the bus unless he can hitch a ride with someone. A lively, bespectacled bachelor who lives alone in a rent-controlled apartment, he can't drive. Nor can he afford a limo, though some of the most successful people in show business attribute their very sensibility as artists to him.
"Where do you begin? He shaped the way I think," said Ben Cosgrove, Paramount Pictures' senior vice president of production.
"I would not be the person I am today without him, or make the films I make," said Brett Morgen, the Oscar-nominated co-director of "On the Ropes" and "The Kid Stays in the Picture."
"Single biggest influence of my life," said screenwriter Alex Kurtzman ("Mission: Impossible III," "Transformers").
"I actually have a theory," said actor Zooey Deschanel, "that everything in Hollywood is directly or indirectly influenced by Jim Hosney. And if it's not the case, it should be."
Jim Hosney doesn't work in show business. He's not a critic or an emeritus studio head. In one of the sharper ironies of a field often disparaged as mindless and superficial, the most influential Hollywood player you've probably never heard of is a 63-year-old English teacher. This month, after a career that has spanned nearly four decades, he'll be taking early retirement from Santa Monica's Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, where he has taught high school film studies and literature for 25 years.
Before Crossroads, he spent a decade at the Westlake School for Girls (now Harvard-Westlake), and, since 1980, he has taught graduate-level film history on the side at the American Film Institute. Over time, he has become a minor cult figure on Los Angeles' show-business-heavy Westside, not only for his singular approach to great books and popular culture, but also for the legions of tastemakers who credit their understanding of L.A.'s signature art form -- storytelling -- to him.
Hosney's pop culture proteges number in the hundreds -- writers, performers, moviemakers, film scholars at USC and UCLA. Jack Black and Maya Rudolph did some of their earliest work for him. So did producers Bryan Burk ("Lost," "Alias"), Jason Blumenthal ("The Pursuit of Happyness"), Danielle Renfrew ("Waitress") and Matthew Greenfield ("Chuck & Buck," "The Good Girl").
