Is Weintraub the New Mogul on the Block?

Stand on a corner watching the Hollywood parade go by and you have to conclude that it never ends and that, as the French figured out long ago, the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

Corporately, the motion-picture industry bears almost no resemblance to the industry of a quarter century ago. The moguls, except for Lew Wasserman of MCA-Universal (who denies he is a mogul), are gone. The so-called majors are otherwise corporate shells with new owners and different players inside.

New outfits have eased their way into the parade. A few have survived and more have limped away, broke and burned out by their expensive, failed efforts to get the crowds to laugh, cry or just pay attention.

But more new outfits keep joining the parade, lured by the big, big money to be made if you get the crowd’s attention. And there are still the sneak previews and the sleepers, the quick flops and the sudden hits, the hype and the hopes.

Just now the newest and biggest of the players is the former agent, manager and all-purpose entrepreneur Jerry Weintraub. His Weintraub Entertainment Group begins with the largest start-up bankroll in the town’s history, some $461 million, including $11 million of his own money. There is $62 million from a stock issue, $81 million from a bond issue, nearly $150 million in film advances from Columbia, a hefty line of bank credit and investments from other sources, including Columbia itself.

Weintraub Entertainment has 20th-floor offices in a glossy new high-rise where once sat a lumber yard, at Sepulveda and Santa Monica boulevards, hard by the San Diego Freeway. Weintraub’s board room gazes west through huge windows across Santa Monica to the ocean, which you can see even on an unclear day.

The question is: How do you invest a nest egg so large that it doesn’t shrivel up and disappear, as new Hollywood bets have a glum way of doing?

To set the scene, Weintraub’s previous outings as a producer-investor have included Robert Altman’s “Nashville”; George Burns’ “Oh, God!” (but not its sequels; one visitation was about right, Weintraub says); James Bridges’ homage to James Dean, “Sept. 30, 1955”; William Friedkin’s controversial “Cruising,” and Barry Levinson’s “Diner,” as well as two outings of “The Karate Kid.” By any measure, it’s an impressive mix of commercial success and critical acclaim, one or the other if not always both.

“I’m going to do quality entertainment for a large audience,” Weintraub says. “It’s project by project; you can’t say it more specifically than that. I try to feel where the audience is going and what’ll be commercial. You have to make money; that’s what it’s about.”

He is betting heavily on comedy. “The movie audience was brought up on situation comedies. That’s my gut feeling; I don’t do research. Comedy is bigger and done better in the movies than on TV. And the audience wants to be entertained. It’s that simple.”

Actually the first Weintraub Entertainment film to reach the public will be a pickup, “Big Blue,” a French film about diving, shot in English in Greece, Peru and France. It opened this year’s Cannes festival, to an indifferent reception. Weintraub says it has since be re-edited and trimmed by 20 minutes.

Weintraub will also be releasing “Fresh Horses,” a drama based on a play and featuring Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy, and “The Gods Must Be Crazy Part II,” a sequel to the sleeper success by South African film maker Jamie Uys.

The first from-the-ground-up Weintraub production, “My Stepmother Is an Alien,” starring Dan Aykroyd and Kim Basinger and directed by Richard Benjamin, is due out at Thanksgiving.

It is one of four Weintraub Entertainment films in production in Los Angeles. “I’m not against locations,” Weintraub says, “but when they’re here, you can keep hands on.”

“Daddy’s Little Girl,” another comedy, has Tony Danza as a widower trying to steer his beautiful teen-age daughter (Amy Dolenz) through her first season of dating.

Douglas Day Stewart, who wrote “An Officer and a Gentleman,” has written and is directing “Mismatch,” about an underdog debating team from a very small college. The team includes Moon Zappa and Quinn Cummings.

“Be Prepared,” alternately known as “Troop Beverly Hills,” has Shelley Long as leader of her daughter’s blase Girl Scout group. It is being directed by Jeff Kanew, who did “Tough Guys.”

Altogether, Weintraub says, Weintraub Entertainment has some 50 projects in development. These include “Evita,” which Oliver Stone will direct. “Oliver’s just back from Argentina and he’s got permission to use all the actual locations, including the balcony where Evita used to speak.”

Weintraub Entertainment paid $80 million for the library of films assembled by the financially distressed Cannon group. One of the treasures is “The Man in the White Suit,” which Weintraub says he plans to remake. Mel Gibson, with whom Weintraub has signed a long-term agreement, will do a film version of “The Avengers,” the British TV series that starred Patrick Macnee and, in succession, Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg.

Weintraub’s average negative cost per picture is a bit under $15 million, he says, which is about $5 million below the current major studio average. “It’s still too high. This is a hard business. It costs too much to make pictures and to advertise them.

“In fact this business is the hardest in the world but the most fun. I’m a throwback to another time. I like making films. I like actors, directors and writers. I like being on the set. It’s absolute magic to me.

“The first time I drove onto a studio lot I felt as if I’d come home. I felt as if I’d died and gone to heaven.

“The toughest thing is working two years on a picture and then it’s gone over a weekend. Oh, that Saturday morning phone call that gives you the numbers from Friday night . . . .

“But when you create a film from the beginning and then see it on the screen and it works, that’s something else. It beats selling insurance.”