Hudson Hawk. Waterworld. Battlefield Earth. Get Carter. These movies have two things in common: They are awful. And they were bullied into existence by their powerful stars -- respectively, Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner, John Travolta and Sylvester Stallone. In Hollywood, it's called a vanity project, and it's a dirty word.
Movie moguls need stars the way plants need fertilizer. Stars must be kept happy to keep them productive. The suits often say yes to exorbitant demands -- salaries, perks, back-end and merchandising deals.
But vanity projects are like land mines buried in the shallow soil of L.A. Frequently, they blow up. Creative decisions go awry, egos and budgets run amok. The studios protect themselves by leaking nasty stories that blame the star. The movie becomes a punchline, an Ishtar. The shrapnel shreds careers. So when producers hear an actor say, "This is my pet picture, my baby," they back slowly out of the room.
There is one producer, though, who actively seeks out vanity projects. His name is Elie Samaha, he's a 44-year-old Lebanese immigrant and he's living his own Hollywood dream.
It started when he was a teenage kick-boxer living in New York and working security at nightclubs, chatting up the celebrities who passed through his velvet rope. It continued when he moved to L.A. in 1982 and opened a string of dry cleaners (research had told him it was one of the town's most lucrative businesses), then restaurants and nightclubs. One of these, The Roxbury on Sunset Strip, hit big in the late eighties; Samaha partied with Stallone and Willis, and married actress Tia Carrere ( Wayne's World, Relic Hunter).
Eventually the club was parodied in the film A Night at the Roxbury, and Samaha and Carrere divorced. But in the past five years, he has turned himself into a prolific film producer by combining the cash from his dry-cleaning stores with the high-profile pals he drank with in his VIP rooms.
Samaha specializes in projects no one else will touch, using money Hollywood deems crass. He started small: One of his first films, 20 Dates, was a $60,000 (U.S.) documentary about a recently divorced, would-be filmmaker named Myles who embarks on the titular quest. The best thing about it are Samaha's own foul-mouthed rants at Myles.
" My f--king brother is a priest and he goes out on more dates than you do in a f--king month," Samaha rails halfway in. In a masterstroke of both ego and unconcern, he lets it all appear in the final cut.
One imagines that when dealing with John Travolta on Battlefield Earth, which cost $50-million, Samaha cleaned up his language (I can't be sure; Samaha didn't return my calls). For 10 years, Travolta, an avowed Scientologist, had pitched a film version of his guru L. Ron Hubbard's novel all over L.A. Even when Travolta was at his most popular, the major studios shuddered at the Scientology connection.
Samaha, however, embraced it. He financed Battlefield, as he does all his films, with a patchwork of cash: a bit from his company, Franchise Pictures; a bit from Europe and Asia; and a bit from Travolta himself (in addition to a big pay cut, the star invested $5-million of his own money). Samaha shoots in Canada to keep costs low, presells his pictures to foreign markets and sells domestic rights to Warner Bros. and other studios for next to nothing. If they don't respect him, he doesn't care -- as long as they keep doing business with him.
Battlefield Earth, which opened in May, bombed. Samaha's latest movie, Get Carter, opened last weekend to terrible reviews (a day late, because Warners, knowing it was a stinker, didn't allow critics to see it in advance).
But Samaha will get the last laugh.
His costs are covered and he's had a few modest successes, including The Whole Nine Yards, starring Bruce Willis, and The Art of War, with Wesley Snipes. And that's enough to keep the money rolling in, the stars interested and a half-dozen films in the works, such as Angel Eyes, starring Jennifer Lopez.
What Samaha knows -- what Hollywood doesn't want to admit -- is that all movies are vanity projects in one way or another. Francis Ford Coppola just added 60 minutes of cut footage to Apocalypse Now. (Sixty minutes! The mind reels.) The Exorcist has been rereleased with the tepid ending that writer-producer William Peter Blatty always wanted. Every other new DVD includes a so-called director's cut, and any fool with a digital video camera and an Internet connection can call himself a filmmaker.
It's an unedited, egomaniacal business and it's getting more so: Hollywood is gearing up for a massive Writers Guild strike in May, followed by a Screen Actors Guild strike in July, by throwing money at every screenwriter and actor who can promise a finished film by April 1, no matter how weak the script. (More on this in a future column.) Who better to rule an industry in flux than an uncensored outsider who knows how to cultivate vanity to serve his own ends?
Johanna Schneller