Bob’s Big Boy Baby
New Liner’s recall reefer, Divine and madness
By Jerry Roberts
Variety Aug 23-29, 1999
This one came from way beyond Hollywood and lurked for decades on the lunatic fringe, doing slasher pictures with everything from breakfast cutlery to large power tools, going both Euro chic and Euro trash, yet domestically pulling stunts by perpetuating bad taste from Baltimore and blood lust in Texas.
No, this isn't the tale of the rise and fall of waif No. 163 or another addict-actor. It's the success story of New Line Cinema, which grew from a living room in a fifth-story walkup above a Greenwich Village bar into one of the most successful and diverse mini-major studios in the film biz. Now ensconced in the Time Warner empire side by side with Warner Bros. through Time Warner's 1997 purchase of Turner Broadcasting, which had bought New Line in 1993, the outfit has boasted an output in the century's final decade of some Jim Carrey hits, the "Austin Powers" franchise and such critically acclaimed gems as "Wag the Dog," "Shine," "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Boogie Nights."
Moving on up
New Line made steps upward through the 1980s and'90s with the lucrative "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" franchises, but its beginnings are illustrated by terms like ragtag and hardscrabble.
" Plenty of times I hated some of the people I had to rely on, and the fact that we had no money," says New Line chairman-CEO Robert Shaye. Fortunately Shaye had two motivating quotes: His father, who was in the supermarket business, told him, "Even if you go bust in the film business, you can always be a short order cook." Then there was Stanley Kubirick who when asked if he ever took a vacation, was supposed to have said. "A vacation from what?"
A 25-year-old Columbia law school student in 1967, Shaye was a wannabe actor and occasional still photographer when he made an 11-minute short called "Image," described in one quarter as "a philosophical meditation on the nature of reality."
Although the film was bought by the Museum of Modern Art for its permanent archives Shaye was rebuffed by distributors. So he became his own distributor.
Blank Czech
With $1,000 lie founded New Line Cinema in New York City and convinced reps of the Czech film delegation, whom he ha met at MoMA, to grant him distribution rights to two of their films, "Martyrs of Love" and "End of August," on American college campuses. It was a zero- money upfront deal with 50-50 profit sharing.
With a lineup of the two Czech pictures and several short films by friends and three by himself, Shaye built up a network by phoning campus film societies and student-activities directors. His initial lineup drew bookings, but New Line lost money.
Tiny steps
The first real significant step forward for the company was in securing the American distribution rights to a film Shaye hated: Jean-Luc Godard's "Sympathy for the Devil," starring Mick Jagger and the rest of the Rolling Stones in a treatise on revolution.
" They wanted $75,000 as a guarantee and I only had $11,000 in the bank," Shaye remembers. "And I hated the film. One night, I went out with the lawyer for the Beatles. He said, 'Forget that, this is the Rolling Stones and they're getting big.' So, I wrote the producer and said, 'You get 60%, 1 get 40% until after $100,000.' To my shock, he accepted. We got nontheatrical rights, to college campuses, and it went over big."
Movie 'Madness'
Another lurch forward was New Line's rerelease of a loony 1936 film that was in the public domain - "Reefer Madness," which espoused that one toke on a marijuana cigarette could send any American youth on the road to rain. In its initial two years of release, "Reefer Madness" netted $2 million, $300,000 of which went into New Line's coffers.
An even bigger boost came in 1972 with Baltimore-based filmmaker John Waters' "Pink Flamingos," which depicted drag queen Divine consuminng dog excrement. Then there was a truly scary little homemade item called "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."
As is the case with other indie distributors with big ideas, Shave wanted to get into filmmalkng. He was doing his annual Cannes Intl. Film Festival scramblings in 1975, failing, as usual, to get the rights to the newest Dusan Makavejev film, and he met some stunt men. And out of those conversations grew the idea of making a picture about the making of a picture in which someone is killing off the stunt men.
Bad luck
New Line pre-sold the film to the Far East and investor Peter Davis kicked in most of the rest. But on the day production was supposed to start, the star, Don Stroud, was in a serious auto accident.
The second punch landed the same day when half of the promised investment was pulled out from under the production. "It was fraught with peril," Shaye says of what became "Stunts," helmed by Mark L. Lester.
Robert Forster replaced Stroud on two days notice and one investor closed refinancing on a building and could afford to cover the rag pullout with an additional $60,000. Made for a total of $600 000, it grossed more than $2 million.
Prestige for the company came in 1979 with nothing less than an Oscar for best foreign- language film. One of the films that Shaye had managed to bring across the pond was Bertrand Blier's "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs," staining Gerard Depardieu and Carol Laure. Yul Brynner and Natalie Wood opened the envelope at center stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and announced that the Oscar went to New Line's baby.
Tough town
" We went down to Studio 54 to celebrate," inveterate New Yorker Shaye recalls. He told the bouncer, "I just won an Academy Award!" And the bouncer said, "Buddy, you're not on the list."
The ups and downs continued for New Line. One day, Shaye was walking in Green-wich Village and his daughter, who spotted a classmate, Michael Lynne's daughter. "I knew Mike from Columbia Law School, but just casually,” says Shaye. “I told him about New Line and what I was doing and that I needed some investors.”
Lynne asked Shaye for a retainer, which emptied his bank account. "Then the first thing he did was take me to a bankruptcy lawyer. But he became very participatory."
Lynne recalls, "I had my own firm, Blumenthal & Lynne. In 1982, 1 got involved as an outside lawyer. At the time, Bob was interested in reorganizing his financing and he asked me to help him do that, and I did, between 1982 and 1984." The initial investment came from Mitch Leigh, a client of Lynne's. Also, Bob Davidoff, who had al- ready invested in New Line, agreed to invest even more. "So, we got a million together plus $250,000 and that paired with financing from Chemical Bank allowed New Line to finance the production of movies."
Profit center
Meanwhile, Shaye had scraped together financing to make a low-budget horror picture called "A Nightmare on Elm Street," by a fringe dweller named Wes Craven. He brought "Nightmare” in at $1.8 million, Freddy Kreuger was born and the picture brought New Line 23 million bones in 1984 dollars.
About the same time, Michael De Luca came on board at New Line as an intern, video was booming and Lynne was making deals. "The deal with Chemical Bank allowed New Line to ramp up production, and do a sequel to 'Nightmare,' " Lynne says. “Then we entered into an agreement with RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, which was primarily a distribution company, to produce a slate of films" - 10 unnamed movies for a total of $15 million.
Further security came when the company went public in 1986. Drexel Burnham Lambert underwrote the initial public offering, which generated $4.5 million in production monies. And New Line became the first independent studio to become a publicly traded company.
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