Action-Movie Director Segues Into Executive Suite

Movie director Hal Needham once predicted he’d never win an Oscar.

But Needham got one in March, not for making a movie but for helping to design a camera car with a crane in it that makes filming action scenes easier. When he accepted the award, Needham joked that film critics would suffer heart attacks when they learned the news.

After all, Needham is the one who directed Burt Reynolds as he smashed his way through a fleet of cars to become the top box-office star in the late 1970s and early ‘80s with such films as “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Smokey and the Bandit II” and “Cannonball Run.” The movies were among the most critically panned, yet enormously profitable films of the past 12 years and made Reynolds what the actor calls “the Laurence Olivier of cars.”

Needham, 56, is now taking the Oscar-winning vehicle and his money-making touch and trying to make a success out of Camera Platforms International, a publicly held company in Valencia. The former stunt man and eighth-grade dropout, who heads the company as chairman and chief executive, acknowledges that he knows virtually nothing about business.

‘It’s My Money’

“I thought stock was something that grazed in a pasture until 2 1/2 years ago. Hell, I just got into this because it’s my money,” Needham said with a Southern accent he developed growing up in Memphis, Tenn.

Camera Platforms owns 16 camera cars--actually trucks--that rent for $300 to $650 a day and can cost as much as $275,000 to build. Camera cars are used to film such scenes as highway chases or to pull a car filled with actors. Normally, film directors must rent separate camera cars and cranes. But Needham’s design is more versatile, mostly because he has built a crane into the camera car so that it can hoist a camera for outdoor shots, move the camera along with the action or tow a car.

Most of the company’s efforts, however, are directed at what Needham hopes will be its biggest product--a ballast that controls the flow of electricity in high-intensity lights commonly used by directors to light sets. The company is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the ballast, which Needham believes will make movie lighting safer and eliminate troublesome light flickers. He also believes that the ballast could have a much wider use in commercial lighting.

So far, though, Camera Platforms is suffering from the usual problems of a start-up company. For the nine months ended Sept. 30, the company lost $907,699, with about $392,657 in revenue from its camera-car rentals. Needham attributes the loss to research and development expenses for the ballast.

Needham is so committed to the company that he hasn’t directed a movie in nearly two years. He also sank $2.5 million of the estimated $15 million he made from movies into the company. He and his partner, William Fredrick, whom Needham credits with designing the camera car and the ballast, each own about 26% of the company, stakes that are worth about $5 million each, based on a closing price Monday of $4.75 a share over the counter.

Camera Platforms, founded in June, 1985, was an outgrowth of Needham’s friendship with Fredrick, who designed a “Budweiser Rocket Car” Needham owned. In 1979, it became the only vehicle to break the sound barrier on land.

$10-Million Loan

Needham also persuaded UST Inc., formerly U.S. Tobacco, to lend the new company $10 million in exchange for an option to buy a majority interest within three years. Needham is a close friend of UST Chairman Louis Bantle, whose Skoal chewing tobacco sponsors Needham’s stock car on the racing circuit.

Needham’s move to running Camera Platforms comes during something of a lull in his directing career. After a string of film hits, Needham hit a lull with a couple of duds such as “Stroker Ace” and “Body Slam.”

Reynolds, one of Needham’s best friends, believes that Needham has been treated unfairly for someone who made so many profitable movies. Reynolds said Needham is shunned by some studio executives because of his candor, combined with a lack of success with his past few films. He said the scripts that Needham is usually offered aren’t worth filming.

“The stuff they were sending him was such garbage,” Reynolds said. “Hal made an enormous amount of money for a lot of those studios, and the people who run those studios should be thankful for that.”

Needham realizes that his outspokenness may be coming back to haunt him in Hollywood.

“It’s true I don’t play by the rules all the time. Anytime you are successful, people will say you are a smart ass. I’m sure they say that about me,” he said.

One of his more controversial comments came in a 1980 interview with The Times in which Needham seemingly brushed off directing as “a snap” and said that, although he would never get an Oscar for a picture, he would “be a rich son of a bitch.” The remarks angered some other directors and studio executives who take the profession more seriously.

The “snap” comment, in particular, is frequently dredged up. “Whenever I’m having a troublesome day,” Needham said, “someone like Reynolds says to me, ‘It’s a snap, isn’t it Needham?’ ”

Needham brings some of that candor to his new company. In his first annual report last spring, Needham began his letter to shareholders by telling them that he had rejected a chairman’s statement drafted for him because “I couldn’t pronounce half of the words I had supposedly written.”

Needham doesn’t dress or act the chief executive part. He wears blue jeans, downs screwdrivers during lunches, addresses casual acquaintences as “babe,” secretaries as “honey” and is difficult to quote at length because cuss words fill most of his sentences.

Style Fools People

Reynolds, however, said Needham’s country style fools a lot of people.

“‘He’s a good ol’ boy, but I wouldn’t take him too lightly because he’s pretty damn smart. If the corporate jungle isn’t somewhere he’s been before, he’ll figure it out pretty quickly,” he said.

Needham came to Hollywood in the 1950s after serving in the Army and became a stunt man, doubling for actor Richard Boone on the television Western “Have Gun Will Travel.” He had advanced to a second unit director, staging action and stunt scenes for movies, and was living in Reynolds’ guest house in the Hollywood Hills when he got the chance in 1975 to direct “Smokey and the Bandit.”

Needham was later sued by a screenwriter, who claimed that the first “Smokey” film was his idea. Needham, who has co-writing credit on it, has always denied the accusation, claiming that the suit was only filed because the movie was a success. The suit was later settled for more than $1 million, he said.

Critics often panned Needham’s movies. One critic, after viewing “Smokey and the Bandit II,” said Needham “demonstrates a total lack of regard for his audience.”

Variety Ad

And Needham often fought back. In 1980, he took out a two-page ad in Variety, reprinting on the first page excerpts from some of the criticisms Smokey II received from reviewers, along with a sentence noting that the film had set a record $18.1 million in opening grosses. On the opposite page was a picture of Needham, hands outstretched, sitting on a wheelbarrow full of money parked outside a Wells Fargo Bank branch.

Turning Camera Platforms into a moneymaker is Needham’s most pressing task. He expects the ballast design to be widely available next year and hopes the company will turn profitable by midyear.

One of Needham’s chief business rivals is Leonard Chapman, owner of Chapman Studio Equipment in North Hollywood, the film industry’s largest lessor of cranes for pictures. Chapman said the camera car-crane Needham leases is “a very pretty unit and has good ideas in it.” But, he said, his company “is not concerned about it.”

Needham hopes to direct a movie based on the best-selling autobiography written by his friend, pilot Chuck Yeager. He is reluctant, however, to predict when he will return to directing, in part because heading Camera Platforms has been much more difficult than he thought, although he said UST executives have been helping him run it.

“It’s a hell of a responsibility. When I said I’d be chairman, I thought it was almost like an honorary thing. But it’s a major, major job. Christ, it’s a hell of a lot more than I thought it was,” Needham said.

Obviously, it’s not a snap.