Bob Shaye has a Unique new line

New LINE founder Bob Shaye is easily the most complicated, combative and prickly studio boss the modern-day movie business has ever seen. Perhaps that’s why I’m so delighted to see that he’s poised to make a comeback after being given the boot earlier this year by Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes, who axed most of New Line’s 500 employees in a get-tough cost-cutting measure designed to impress restive Time Warner stockholders.

In an era where the business is dominated by timid bean-counters in stylish suits, Shaye is a throwback to the riverboat-gambler types who used to thrive in Hollywood, having risked his company’s future time and again, most notably when he agreed to make a trilogy of “Lord of the Rings” films after everyone else had shown “LOTR” filmmaker Peter Jackson the door.

After laying low and licking his wounds for several months, Shaye, 69, gave me his first interview since Bewkes folded New Line into Warner Bros. back in February. It has long been rumored that Shaye and New Line Co-Chairman Michael Lynne would resurface with a new production company. Now Shaye is making it official, saying he and Lynne have formed Unique Features, which will make two to four films a year, funded and distributed by Warners as part of a three-year first-look distribution deal.

Shaye says the company will have a dozen or so employees, most of them based in Los Angeles in temporary digs just a floor above the old New Line headquarters on Robertson Boulevard. “It’ll be a very democratic company,” Shaye told me. “Everybody will share in whatever success we have. I’m expecting the receptionist to be as prescient about the marketplace as I am.”

Shaye’s critics would probably say it wouldn’t be hard to find a receptionist with a better eye for hit movies than the boss. New Line had a great 40-year run, helping to create the modern-day comedy business, championing African American talent and overseeing such hit franchises as “The Lord of the Rings,” “Rush Hour,” “Austin Powers,” “Blade” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” But in the past few years, New Line was an also-ran among major studios, hurt by a lack of creative energy and focus.

Shaye admits that New Line had its problems, saying, “We got too big and there were too many political dramas going on.” He says he wasn’t involved in most of the company’s creative decisions in recent years. “I ended up being a cheerleader and an administrator, but I really didn’t have an opportunity to implement my real production desires and interests. I missed putting my stamp on the movies we were making.”

He says things will be different with Unique. “It won’t have anyone else’s stamp on it except Michael and myself. That’s one of the things that I’m excited about. I’ll be much more directly involved as an advocate for projects. I won’t just be going with the flow. I’ll be making hands-on decisions about what is entertaining.”

Shaye bristled when I reminded him that, according to New Line lore, if he’d been picking the studio’s releases, they probably never would have made any of its comedy hits. Shaye would often toss away comedy scripts, complaining they were too broad or juvenile. “That’s total nonsense,” he said. “I liked a lot of our comedies. [New Line production chief] Toby Emmerich is fond of saying I didn’t like ‘Wedding Crashers,’ but I think his memory is foggy. I wasn’t enthusiastic about it as a script, but once Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson got on board, the movie’s chemistry showed up.”

It was Shaye who plucked Emmerich from obscurity in 2000, making him New Line’s production chief after Shaye fired longtime production boss Mike De Luca. Emmerich’s relations with Shaye have been strained in recent months, with Emmerich staying on to run the company after Shaye and Lynne were sent packing. Recalling a 2007 Cedric the Entertainer flop that Emmerich had championed, Shaye added: “If you want to talk about comedy taste, remember that I didn’t like ‘Code Name: The Cleaner’ either.”

Shaye’s insistence on keeping his new company’s offices in the Warner-owned New Line building struck many observers as an unusual move for someone who’d been unceremoniously ousted from the company he ran for 40 years. His presence on the premises led to a recent dust-up in which Emmerich got into a noisy altercation with Shaye’s assistant after Emmerich parked his motorcycle in Shaye’s parking space one weekend. Shaye downplayed the conflict, saying, “Toby and I are having a conversation about that right now. I’m sure it will all work out.”

But Shaye couldn’t downplay his feelings about the way Warners fired 450 staffers, refusing all of Shaye and Lynne’s efforts to save as many employees as they could. When Shaye first tried to speak about his forced exit from the company he started in his Greenwich Village apartment four decades ago, his voice cracked and he began to weep. He had to take a few moments to compose himself.

“It was profoundly sad and painful,” he finally said, his voice raw with emotion. “I’ve only had two other times in my recent past where I’ve suffered so much. One was when I lost my dog and the other was when I lost such a huge amount of my net worth because I kept my Time Warner stock because I believed in the greater good at the company. You read stories in the newspaper about factories being closed and people’s lives being displaced and imagining what happens when people have to start all over again. . . .”

He stopped to compose himself again. “Well, it’s one thing to read about it in the paper and another thing to walk down the halls of our building on June 27, which was the last day of the old New Line. There were a lot of tears. It was tough to deal with. I felt like a 40-year-old child had been taken away from me. This company was my best friend in my life.”

Shaye is still wrestling with his feelings about Bewkes, whom Shaye had considered a good friend. “Jeff is a very enigmatic and idiosyncratic guy,” he says. “I don’t have any animosity toward him. I still think of him as a, well, as a past friend. I just wish he’d let us go a different route and buy the company, but that wasn’t in the cards.”

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This item and others can be found on the Big Picture blog (latimes.com/thebigpicture).