Mini Mogul Squeezes Profit From Movie Making’s Lowest Budgets

Samuel Goldwyn, the late movie mogul, once said that a great picture has to start with a great story.

Victor Alexander, president of a low-budget film maker called American Victor Organization, has a different approach: “If you have Western costumes, you do a Western. If you have military outfits, you do a Vietnam movie.”

Alexander heads an operation that is low-budget movie making at its lowest. His “studio,” where he edits and stores film, is the garage in his 20-year-old tract home in Newbury Park. Movies are shot in as little as 16 days, with Vietnam scenes for a recent film shot on location in Riverside and sequences for a low-budget Western shot at a horse ranch 5 minutes from his house.

Sometimes his stars are his bankers. One of Alexander’s financial backers was an ex-karate champion turned bartender who took out a second mortgage on his home to raise $15,000. The contribution helped him win the starring role, Alexander said, in the film “Kill Zone.”

Alexander, 44, is a mini mogul, one of scores of people who want to make movies and do so by producing low-budget offerings that are often financed and acted in by friends who work for free on the promise they’ll be paid if the picture ever makes money.

Equipment is borrowed by exchanging a promise of sharing future profits, if any, that are made. In one case, Alexander found equipment for a war movie by donating money to a military museum.

Alexander’s current offering is “Hell’s Outlaw,” a $75,000 slasher film that he produced and directed about a Western outlaw who rises from the dead to kill yuppies planning to build a resort on the ranch where he was hanged 100 years earlier. Alexander hasn’t sold it yet, despite trying to peddle it at the Cannes Film Festival this spring in the south of France.

“Hell’s Outlaw” stars Tag Groat and his brother, Rick, who when they aren’t acting or producing their own low-budget films, support themselves by doing Western shows at corporate picnics.

At the end of the movie, Rick, the good guy, cuts off the head of Tag, the bad guy. As the head sits in a field laughing, a headless horseman rides by and grabs it while a country-western singer croons “he picked his head up off the ground, and we still don’t know if he is dead.”

A native of Iraq, Alexander got into the movie business after studying film at San Francisco State University and working nearly five years making films and documentaries in Norway. So far, he has produced or co-produced five low-budget pictures in the United States, usually becoming a partner merely by supplying the camera equipment and film while relying on outside investors for other production costs.

He has supported his movie making by free-lancing as a cameraman, film editor and laboratory technician. He also gets financial help from his wife, Liv Marie, an aerospace designer at Litton who will star in one upcoming film called “Star Quest,” which he describes as “a future fantasy story of a woman caught between two worlds and times.”

Alexander estimates that they have spent at least $200,000 over the past three years. The company’s primary assets are $100,000 in camera, laboratory and editing equipment, a 1986 Isuzu pickup truck and a 1985 Ford van.

Number Unknown

No one knows how many ultra-low-budget films are produced each year. Some 450 films altogether are released annually in the United States, according to the Motion Picture Assn. of America. It’s fair to say that countless others are never screened beyond living room showings for friends and family.

Alexander, however, and partners actually have sold two pictures: “Kill Zone,” which is being syndicated on television in the United States, and a murder mystery called “Survival,” which is being distributed on videocassette in Scandinavia.

“Kill Zone,” which cost $92,000 to make, is about a Vietnam veteran who goes berserk in the same way Sylvester Stallone did in the first Rambo picture, “First Blood.” The film was described in a 1985 review in Variety as a “tame action thriller” that “takes an eternity to unfold.”

Shapiro Entertainment, a Studio City picture distributor, bought the licensing rights to “Kill Zone” for a future percentage of sales. Leonard Shapiro, president of Shapiro Entertainment, said “Kill Zone” is a “well-crafted exploitation film for the price.”

Shapiro sold “Kill Zone” for television syndication for $140,000 to Samuel Goldwyn Television, which Alexander says paid Shapiro $28,000 up front and will pay the rest over five years. Another company, Vestron, paid Shapiro $75,000 to distribute “Kill Zone” on home videocassette in the United States and Canada.

$20,000 Profit

For his part, mini mogul Alexander expects to make a $20,000 profit over three years for his role in making the film. It’s not much, but it’s probably more profit than will be made on the $47-million box-office bomb “Ishtar.”

Samuel Goldwyn Television then sold “Kill Zone” as part of an 18-picture package of B-grade adventure movies called “The Explosives” to stations in about 50 major television markets. Goldwyn executives expect “Kill Zone” to gross $750,000 over a two-year period.

The movie first aired in March on Fox Channel 11 in Los Angeles. Elizabeth Saunders, the station’s vice president of promotion and creative services, said the film fared well in its 9 o’clock time period, with a rating that showed about 8% of those watching televisions in the area were tuned into “Kill Zone.”

Shapiro says, however, that such low-budget movies are losing their appeal because the television syndication market is soft and because home video audiences seem to want better quality films.

The most controversial aspect of low-budget film making the Alexander way is how actors are paid. He is a non-union producer and often uses actors who defer their wages on the promise they’ll be paid if the movie makes money.

“I generally don’t believe in deferral because you usually don’t get paid,” said Wayne Douglas, who played a ranch hand in “Hell’s Outlaw.” “I know the people here. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.”

Alexander said he realizes his films aren’t likely to win an Academy Award but doesn’t care.

“These are B pictures,” Alexander said. “But this is what kept the studios alive in the golden days of Hollywood.”

Mogul Samuel Goldwyn probably would have agreed. “The trouble with this business,” he once said, “is the dearth of bad pictures.”