SOMETHING SUCCESSFUL HIS WAY COMES

“I’m feeling good--not cocky, but pretty good.” Leaning back on the sofa in his rented Bel-Air home, producer Peter Vincent Douglas was indeed a living portrait of satisfaction.

The 29-year-old son of Kirk, half-brother to Michael and erstwhile “baby” of the Douglas clan, finally has a bona fide hit on his hands with “Fletch.” (The Chevy Chase comedy, co-produced with Alan Greisman, has grossed more than $40 million since its June release.)

“Producing has been more difficult for me, and for others who have famous brothers or fathers in the business,” Douglas reflected. (He also produced “The Final Countdown” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”) “There’s a resistance, an ‘OK, so you got a famous family-- you prove it to me’ attitude. I think ‘Fletch’ has gone a long way toward doing that.”

He smiled and the family resemblance--initially overshadowed by his head of blond hair--emerged. There was the telltale notch in his chin, a trademark of his father’s, as well as a winning grin apparently shared by everyone in the family.

While “Fletch” may have validated him as more than “just another Douglas,” it also gave him credit as a tenacious producer, for the movie version of the Gregory McDonald best-seller took nearly seven years to bring to the screen.

“I read it many years before I started producing,” Douglas explained. “I borrowed money to option it and began tracking it from Columbia (Pictures) all over town, along the way becoming friendly with Greg (McDonald).

“I would just about get there and then lose one of the elements--the financing, the star or the option, and so on.”

He finally brought the project to Universal Pictures’ then-production president Thom Mount’s attention, with the suggestion that Chevy Chase star in it.

“Chevy came to mind years prior, from seeing him on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” Douglas said, “but at that point he’d been through some good and bad film projects and said he’d feel more comfortable if Alan Greisman (“Heart Beat,” “Modern Problems”) were involved.”

The teaming of Greisman and Douglas proved compatible, enduring a succession of executive shake-ups at Universal. Douglas provided an unusually candid account of the experience.

“Traditionally, when an executive leaves, his successor gets rid of all the projects. ‘Fletch’ was just the opposite; it survived three regimes,” he recalled.

“Alan and I would sit around saying, ‘Well, if Ned (Tanen, now president of Paramount Pictures) leaves and Bob (Rehme, now co-chairman of New World Pictures) is in, maybe we’d better have a talk with Thom (Mount, who survived both) to see what we should do.”

Douglas began laughing.

“Then it was, ‘Oh, God, Thom’s out because Frank Price is in (as chairman).’ We said to each other, ‘OK, we’ll call Frank up for a meeting.’ We went up there, primed for rejection, since that was the tradition.”

To their surprise and delight, Price gave an immediate go-ahead for “Fletch.” Given its success, Douglas said, plans are under way for a sequel.

“Fletch” was a trial by fire for Douglas, though by no means the first for the one-time black sheep of the family. He had a diversity of interests before producing.

He was pulling in around $25,000 a year in high school from photography, then his chosen profession. “I had terrific access to people because of my parents’ parties,” he explained. “I had a wonderful collection of stills which were published all the time.”

During college at UC Santa Barbara, he got his pilot’s license and combined his two interests by flying to various remote locations to photograph layouts for magazines such as Cosmopolitan.

“I think it (the photography) was almost a little bit of rebellion,” Douglas surmised. “I wasn’t as thrilled by it, but the idea of doing something other than motion pictures was really what excited me at the time.”

However, after transferring to UCLA in the early 1970s, he found himself more and more drawn to his father’s business and was offered a job as production assistant by producer Ray Stark on “The Black Bird,” which starred George Segal.

“It changed my entire outlook on what I really wanted to do. It made photography not as interesting as the whole environment of set life--the people and the craziness and the things that can’t work, but finally do.”

So he quit school--a move that did not endear him to his father--and entered the Directors Guild training program.

“He wasn’t thrilled. He has his degree, even a doctorate, and I became the first of his sons not to finish college,” he explained. The senior Douglas’ attitude began to change when Douglas pere directed “Posse” and needed a producer.

“He asked if I could come in and help with post-production on the picture,” Douglas recalled. “Suddenly, I saw a whole different kind of relationship there--he became not just my father, but a guy who really had talent.”

He laughed. “I found out that there was a reason we lived in a nice house in Beverly Hills and had a projection room and all of that.”

Since then, the two have teamed on a number of projects; the most recent, “Amos,” a television movie, will be seen in October on CBS.

In addition, he has projects in various stages at various studios, although many share a common genre--science fiction.

“I really love science fiction,” he confessed. “I just got my first writing assignment at (20th Century) Fox to do a remake of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ plus Michael Phillips (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) and I are working on a space comedy for Columbia and ‘The End of Eternity’ (based on an Isaac Asimov story) at Tri-Star.”

Douglas paused for a moment, perhaps a bit surprised at the number of projects, then reiterated, “I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to finally be on my own.”