What Makes Elie Run?

“Should I give you the bad news now?” Elie Samaha says with a sly grin. “Or do you want to wait until after the Jewish holidays?”

It is 5:30 on the second night of Passover, and the lights are out all over Hollywood. But it’s a sign of the William Morris Agency’s regard for Samaha that a roomful of top agents, most of them already late for family seders, are huddled in the office of Samaha’s pal Cassian Elwes, the agency’s movie financing and distribution expert, haggling with the dry cleaning and nightclub owner who has suddenly emerged as Hollywood’s hottest movie producer.

Samaha is a blunt-spoken man in a perpetual hurry--on the drive over, when a young woman in a BMW is slow to turn in front of him, he barks, “Come on, grandma!”--so he doesn’t waste time with amenities. If he thinks the agents are fudging one of their stars’ salary numbers, Samaha erupts with an R-rated tirade: “Don’t [expletive] lie to me, my friend!” he snaps.

When the agents tout a prominent young actor for an upcoming bio-pic about Montgomery Clift, playing up the artistic merits of the project, Samaha interrupts: “It’s a labor of love, right? He doesn’t want to get [expletive] paid?” (Translation: If your actor’s willing to work for scale, I might make the movie on a budget.)

All is going well until the agents bring up a sore subject: They’ve heard Samaha has talked to a young actress about a project that is virtually identical to a script that another young actress, one of the agency’s clients, has been trying to launch for years. “You can’t do this to her, you’ll break her heart,” says John Fogelman, another agent in the room. “This is her life’s passion--it’ll kill her.”

At first, Samaha is unmoved. He jokes: “She’s dating [he names a prominent young actor]. Why would she commit suicide?”

But Fogelman presses the case. “Elie, this is not a business decision, this is an ethical decision.” Agent Scott Lambert jumps in: “You’re going to be in this business a long time. There are some situations where you don’t go for the short-term gain.”

Finally, Samaha relents, telling the agents he’s willing to wait until next March. If their movie is in production by then, he’ll abandon his project. But Samaha wants a bonus: The agency’s actress has to do a movie for Samaha--”and for scale,” he says. “Or a cameo for free.”

The agents anxiously nod their heads in agreement. Fogelman suggests someone write down the deal. Lambert says, “Just shake his hand.” Fogelman and Samaha shake hands. The storm has lifted. Samaha signals that the meeting is over by pulling out his wallet and extracting a $100 bill, which he tosses onto Elwes’ desk.

“Change it for me,” he says. “I need money for parking.”

Elwes fishes some $20s out of his wallet. “Why do you need money for parking?” he says.

“I like to give the parking guys a tip,” says Samaha. “It’s the only way they make any money.”

On the way back to his office, Samaha reveals that the negotiation was weighted in his favor. He’s making so many movies that he couldn’t start the rival project until next year anyway. To him, making it in Hollywood is all about knowing how to play the game.

“I really like those guys,” he says. “But they’re agents. They play you all the time. Why can’t you play them?”

*

There is something almost comically larger than life about Samaha, as if the handsome, Armani-clad producer--imagine him as Sly Stallone’s younger brother--had just popped out of a Marvel superhero comic about a budding Hollywood mogul. Born in Italy, reared in Lebanon, the 43-year-old Samaha emigrated to America in 1979. He worked as a bouncer at Studio 54 in New York before moving to Los Angeles in 1984, where he started a chain of dry cleaners, bought real estate and owned various nightclubs and restaurants.

And then, as if someone had waved a magic wand--Shazam! Samaha was a movie producer. Barking obscenities over the phone, sometimes showing up on the set and paying actors with cash out of a paper bag, he cranked out dozens of forgettable low-budget B-movies, most of them first available for viewing on late-night cable TV. Who else can say they made a Marlon Brando movie that went direct to video? Samaha earned money, but little respect. He was one of the few in Hollywood to celebrate when Warner Bros. studio chiefs Terry Semel and Bob Daly left the studio, grousing recently that “they didn’t know who the [expletive] I was.”

So it came as an even bigger surprise when Hollywood recently discovered that--Shazam squared!--Samaha had graduated to the big leagues, reinventing himself as the busiest deal maker in town. Stallone. Bruce Willis. Kevin Costner. John Travolta. Jack Nicholson. Robert De Niro. Jennifer Lopez. Wesley Snipes. They’re all making Samaha movies, distributed--and don’t think Samaha doesn’t enjoy this part--by the same Warner Bros. studio whose bosses once wouldn’t give him the time of day.

It will take a couple of years to figure out whether Samaha is a man of steel or has feet of clay. For now, he’s basking in the glow of his first bona fide hit, “The Whole Nine Yards,” the Bruce Willis mobster comedy that was No. 1 at the box office earlier this year. Riding its success, Samaha has emerged as the latest example of the successful immigrant entrepreneur, harking back to the old rough ‘n’ tumble rulers of Hollywood: Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer and Spyros Skouras, who went from furriers, busboys and junkmen to swashbuckling moguls in a generation.

“After you’ve had a meeting with Elie, you think, ‘I’ve read about people like him in Hollywood novels, but I never thought they existed in real life,’ ” says Tony Safford, senior vice president of acquisitions at 20th Century Fox. “It’s like he stepped right out of ‘What Makes Sammy Run.’ ”

Samaha is not the only recent immigrant to find success in Hollywood. Arnon Milchan, a onetime Israeli armaments dealer, has made a string of box-office hits at New Regency Pictures. Haim Saban, also Israeli, heads up Saban Entertainment, a leading family film company. Mark Amin, who is from Iran, runs Trimark Films, which makes both art and exploitation films.

Avi Lerner, an Israeli immigrant who heads Nu Image, a low-budget film company, says that the film business is especially open to new blood. “I could never succeed as an investment banker--I don’t have the language, the clothes or the customs,” says Lerner, who was a partner of Samaha’s on a number of his early films. “Hollywood is more open, it’s more informal. You can wear tennis shoes and blue jeans. If you have the chutzpah, you can succeed.”

Samaha believes that many Middle Eastern immigrants have gravitated to the movie business because the region has always fostered a fierce competitiveness. “I was on a plane to Paris with Arnon recently and he kept drilling me with questions--he wants to know how I’m putting all these movies together. How did I get Travolta? How did I do a deal with Wesley [Snipes]? I told him, ‘Leave me alone. I want to meditate.’ So he’s competitive, I’m competitive. I was competitive when I was 12 and I haven’t changed. I want to be the best.”

It doesn’t surprise Neal Gabler, author of “An Empire of Their Own,” a history of the Jewish moguls who founded Hollywood, that Samaha has carved a niche for himself: “He has exactly the kind of dazzle and buccaneer-style skills that you don’t see in today’s corporate Hollywood. The more buttoned-down Hollywood becomes, the more room there is for someone like Elie. His lack of polish is his strength.”

Actually, the secret to Samaha’s success is simple: He’s a consummate salesman with the money to back up his pitch. On the phone day and night, the indefatigable producer makes everyone feel like they’re a close friend, with a “Hey, man!” for pals, a “How are you, my brother!” for really good buddies. Do him a favor and he’s right back at you, offering Lakers playoff seats or a night at the Sunset Room, his Hollywood club that has become a favored spot for studio premiere parties.

One night Samaha is flying back from Toronto with Jack Nicholson, the next night he’s dining out with Steven Seagal. It’s a surprise to hear Mike Nichols calling one day to reschedule a meeting--the two men may produce a movie together--but an even bigger surprise to learn that it was Samaha who was too busy to initially meet with the esteemed director.

“I used to have to beg people to return Elie’s phone calls,” says Ken Stovitz, his CAA agent. “Now I have to beg Elie to return other people’s calls.”

In Hollywood, when you have money to make movies, you make a lot of new friends. “In a business where it’s hard to get movies made, Elie has stepped up to the plate,” says William Morris President Jim Wiatt. “He’s a throwback to the old studio guys who put everything on the line every time they made a movie. Elie works on gut instinct. You don’t have to wait around to get notes from 10 different development executives. Either he says yes or he says no, and if he says yes, the movie gets made.”

With his colorful demeanor, Samaha provides quite a contrast to the well-bred Ivy League smoothies who run today’s Hollywood. “Elie is a fantastic seducer,” says producer Bill Gerber. “The business has become so hard and cold that it’s great to be around someone who goes to Vegas and shows people a good time. Movie stars like him because he’s a little larger than life.”

Samaha’s timing is good--he arrived in Hollywood just as most of the major studios were losing their enthusiasm for financing expensive big-star projects. Seeking to cut their risk, the studios frequently make deals with outside producers who bankroll the movies with foreign capital. Samaha’s Franchise Pictures will make six Warners films this year, roughly 25% of the studio’s output. As Warner Bros. President Alan Horn puts it: “Having Elie bringing those pictures through the door relieves the pressure on our development system. He chooses the movies and puts up the money. It’s effectively a risk-free deal for us.” (Warners takes a 12.5% distribution fee of the studio’s share of the box-office gross and recoups all of its marketing expenses.)

*

Samaha’s business model is simple--he’s the patron saint of lost causes. He befriends actors who have a pet project no one else is willing to make, keeping the film’s budget down by persuading the stars to take a lesser fee in return for a potentially lucrative piece of the film’s gross. One example is “Battlefield Earth,” a Travolta project that had been passed around from studio to studio without ever having been made. Artisan Films co-CEO Amir Malin, who was once partnered with Samaha in Millennium Films, puts it this way: “Elie gets actors to do the movie for the wholesale price, not retail.”

Once a star is in place, Samaha can raise 65% to 75% of the film’s budget by using the actors’ marquee value to help him sell off the foreign rights, with the rest of the budget coming from bank loans. One way he cuts costs is going after projects that have been sitting on a studio shelf, deemed either too costly or flawed to make.

“I’d rather overpay for a turnaround project than develop something that will never mature into anything,” he says. “The studios spend millions in development every year. We’re not going to pay $500,000 for a rewrite and then not have the star do it. We pick the scripts the stars already want to make.”

Samaha saves even more money by making the films in Canada, which shaves up to 30% off the budget. He has four movie crews there, two in Montreal. He also owns part of a catering service, which allows him to feed his cast and crew for half of what a studio pays. He also gets a bargain deal on film stock from Fuji and Kodak by guaranteeing them a minimum purchase of 5 million feet of film each year. Samaha says that “The Whole Nine Yards” would’ve cost $45 million to make in Miami, where its script was originally set. By moving it to Montreal and getting Willis to cut his salary, he slashed the budget to $28 million.

Still, many in Hollywood worry that Samaha’s formula is a high-risk strategy that doesn’t leave much room for failure. History is not on his side. The recent past is littered with the sun-bleached skeletons of high-rolling outsider companies such as Carolco, Savoy and Vestron, which bit the dust after they began swinging for the fences, trying to hit home-runs instead of low-budget, low-risk singles.

Samaha says he won’t be seduced by success. “I’ll walk away before I’ll overpay,” he says. “Kassar went broke because he spent $135 million on ‘Cutthroat Island.’ That’s not the way I make movies. With my movies, the movie stars are my partners. If you give them 25% of the profits, they get out of the trailers faster.”

Samaha passed his first test with “Nine Yards,” which grossed $57 million in the U.S. alone and could easily double that figure overseas. But few industry observers are as optimistic about “Battlefield Earth,” a sci-fi thriller that was stalled for years by budget concerns as well as its Scientology connection: The movie is based on a 1982 novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

Once Samaha got the project, he cut the budget from $100 million to $50 million, shot the film in Canada and covered nearly 80% of his costs from foreign sales. Travolta took a cut in salary--making the film for $16 million--in return for a hefty percentage of the film’s potential profits. The film’s profit potential remains hazy. The studio still hasn’t screened the film and, according to the Wall Street Journal, the movie’s budget ballooned to $70 million. (Samaha says “less than $65 million.”) The conventional wisdom: The film, which opens May 12, will have an uphill fight attracting Travolta’s core female audience and could lose its young-male fans to “Gladiator,” which arrives in theaters a week earlier.

Samaha insists that the film only needs to gross $48 million in the U.S. to be in the money. “If we do $50 million in domestic box-office, I’ll be happy,” he says. “It’s not a summer blockbuster like ‘Gladiator’ or ‘Mission Impossible.’ But it didn’t cost over $100 million like they did. Don’t worry about me--I still sleep well at night.”

Actually, Samaha is too busy to sleep. He gets by on four hours a night, thanks to morning workouts and nightly meditation. When he was on the road recently, he returned a reporter’s call from Madrid at 4 a.m., still going strong. In his sleek Armani suits--which also come at a discount--he has the look of a hungry tiger on the prowl. Driving to a meeting, he points out various choice Beverly Hills properties, rattling off their square footage and offering real estate tips. “Corner properties are very important,” he proclaims. “If you control the corner, you control the block.”

In Hollywood, control doesn’t come quite as easy. So Samaha is going for quality as well as quantity, making classy films like “The Big Kahuna” with Kevin Spacey and “The Third Miracle” with Ed Harris and Anne Heche, plus upcoming pictures from such prestige directors as David Mamet and Kasi Lemmons, who made the critically acclaimed “Eve’s Bayou.” On the other hand, he returns from Europe boasting that he’s signed Verona Feldbusch, a German TV personality, to a three-picture deal. In his office, Samaha eagerly shows the brunet bombshell’s pinup calendar to visitors, having already cast her in a bit part in an upcoming Stallone film, “Get Carter.”

Feldbusch showed her appreciation by sending her mentor a bouquet of yellow roses. One of Samaha’s staffers asks why she didn’t include a card. He smiles. “Probably because she has a boyfriend.”

*

Sometime in the late 1980s, Joey “Pants” Pantoliano, the popular character actor, dropped off a suit and a shirt at the Celebrity Cleaners in Marina del Rey. When he picked up his clothes, the shirt was missing. He demanded to see the owner, which is how he befriended Elie Samaha. As Pantoliano tells the story, Samaha asked how much the shirt cost. Pants told him $300.

“$300!” Samaha responded. “Who the [expletive] pays $300 for a [expletive] shirt?” Pants told Samaha he was an actor. “If you’re a [expletive] actor,” Samaha replied, “how come your picture’s not on my [expletive] wall!” The argument raged for a while until Pants finally said, “OK, enough about my career--what about my shirt?”

“Elie cut right to the chase,” recalls Pantoliano. “He said, ‘I’ll give you $300 in dry cleaning,’ and I said, ‘You’ve got a deal.’ So when he made his first movie, guess who was in it. It was terrible, but Elie made me an associate producer and took care of business.”

Samaha was always an entrepreneur. His sister, Carol, who runs much of his real estate business with his brother, Demitri (who also produces films with Samaha), remembers her brother being “famous in Lebanon” as a 14-year-old concert promoter. Having lost his father when he was a young boy, Samaha grew up fast. At age 10 he was arrested for shooting out street lights. At 13, he beat up one of his teachers and trashed his car, which he claims led to a shootout with police. His mother, who lives in Los Angeles and still cooks sumptuous Sunday meals for the family, had to come pick him up at the police station. (He was never charged in connection with the incident.) “What can I say,” Samaha says. “I was a little rascal.”

Shortly after the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, Samaha left the country, eventually arriving in Los Angeles. Soon he was running Celebrity Cleaners, whose first outlet was on La Cienega Boulevard. The chain had his actor pals’ photos on the walls and boasted one-hour dry cleaning, 24 hours a day. He quickly learned a valuable lesson in movie business economics--the studios would pay top dollar to get something cleaned in a hurry. One day he pointed to a shirt his visitor was wearing. “Take it to a dry cleaner, you can get it done for $1.25. At Celebrity, we’d do it for 99 cents. But it costs the studios $7 to do it. Why? Because they don’t watch their money.”

By 1989, Samaha was in the club business, opening Roxbury on the Sunset Strip. It became celebrity heaven, packed with night-life-loving actors and rock stars, many of whom became Samaha chums and would star in his B-movies. In 1993, at his pal Renny Harlin’s wedding, Samaha met CAA’s Stovitz, who became a key Samaha backer. Soon Samaha was producing his first movie, “The Immortals,” a low-budget thriller about a gang of small-time hoods. Like many of his early movies, it starred his then-wife, Tia Carrere. Samaha boasts that he shot 80% of the film at locations where he owned the real estate. He even put Stovitz to work operating the dolly on the film, which was little more than a supermarket cart with a camera attached.

After Samaha sold the film’s cable, foreign and video rights, he came away with a tidy profit. “I made a million dollars, which is what it takes a year to do in the club business. So I thought to myself, ‘This is a good business.’ ”

If only movie studios had as much synergy as Samaha, whose operations all seem to feed on one another. He’s renovating his three-story offices at the east end of the Sunset Strip, but the new exterior walls won’t be just for show--he plans to rent them out as billboard space. “It’s worth $100,000 just for the advertising,” he says. His movie production companies are housed in buildings he owns. His burgundy Mercedes is a freebie “for me using their cars in my movies.” When Demitri tells him that a Hollywood Hills property they own is available for rent, Samaha earmarks it for a director who’ll be making a film in town, saying it’ll save him $20,000 in the film’s budget. A lengthy discussion ensues over the exact rental rate. Samaha seems to be haggling with his own brother.

“It’s a good deal for Demitri too,” Samaha says afterward. “He’s getting a film director, so he knows he won’t have some [expletive] tenant.”

Samaha loves the art of deal making so much that, as he bluntly says, “I get more excited about a great movie deal or real estate deal than I do about being in bed with a beautiful woman. Buying a new building, putting a film together--it just turns me on.”

He acknowledges that his obsession with work scuttled his marriage to Carrere--they were divorced in February. As part of the divorce, Samaha agreed to a two-picture deal with Carrere, though he has an option to buy her out instead of making the films.

“We’re still friends, and Tia got a very nice settlement--she came out smelling like a rose,” he says. “But we had too many problems. When you’re married to an actress they want to be in all your movies. Tia hated it that I always had to take people out at night and do business on the phone at 4 a.m. Our deal was that I’d be with her twice a week, and I guess that wasn’t enough.”

Say what you will about Samaha--he’s always thinking ahead. Worried about a possible new Canadian tax law that could hit American actors with a steep tax charge, he’s making plans to build sound stages in Mexico and ramp up film production there. He’s also planning a chic Hollywood spa at property he owns farther west on the Strip.

What makes Samaha run? “I learned what I know on the streets,” he says simply. “I may not know how to spell, but let me tell you, I know how to add.”