Trying to Jump-Start a Stalled Studio : Entertainment: MGM/UA's film group chief is faced with a tough task--producing a quick fix, without making promises he can't keep.

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

Feb. 2, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

From his office on the fourth floor of MGM/UA Communications Co.’s rented quarters in Culver City, Richard Berger has a bird’s-eye view of the studio lot that once belonged to his company and now houses Sony Corp.’s Columbia Pictures unit.

It is a measure of Berger’s optimism that he dreams of getting the lot back “someday.”

It is a measure of his realism that the MGM/UA film group president largely keeps such thoughts to himself--and notes that long-term planning is a luxury for others. “I’m basically working in the short term,” he explains, “and the short term is two years, not five years.”

Named to the movie chief’s spot in October, 1988, after three higher-ranking officers quit or were pushed out, Berger spent more than a year marking time as Qintex Group, Turner Broadcasting System, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and others mounted abortive bids to acquire the studio from majority owner Kirk Kerkorian.

As recently as December, in fact, Berger was advised by a Ted Turner aide that he should expect to make films from Atlanta once the Georgia cable television mogul closed what looked like a sure-shot deal to acquire MGM/UA.

By January, however, the Turner merger was dead. And Berger, with a promised war chest of about $185 million from company cash flow and borrowings, was under orders from Kerkorian to revive MGM/UA’s battered movie operation--yet again.

Along the way, he’ll have to impart some of his own considerable credibility in the film-making community to a company that has become known as the most erratic and threadbare of Hollywood’s major studios.

(MGM/UA Communications was formed by Kerkorian after Turner bought about half the assets of the old MGM/UA Entertainment Co. for $1.5 billion in 1986. Turner sold MGM’s Culver City lot to Lorimar, which was acquired by Warner Communications, which traded the lot to Sony in exchange for half of the Burbank Studios.)

“Richard told me he has the money to operate his company properly. If anyone else at MGM/UA told me that, I’m not sure I would believe them. . . . With Richard, I have no skepticism,” said Stephen Deutsch, a longtime Berger friend who produced “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” for Orion and is now working with MGM/UA.

Fifty years old and darkly handsome, Berger has held seven different jobs at MGM/UA since joining the company in 1985 under Alan Ladd Jr., with whom he had worked at 20th Century Fox Film Corp. in the 1970s.

No stranger to turmoil, Berger founded Touchstone Films for Walt Disney Productions in 1984 but released only a single movie, “Splash,” before resigning in favor of the Michael Eisner-Jeffrey Katzenberg regime.

Katzenberg later asked Berger to return to Disney, but he preferred to take his chances with MGM/UA, where he briefly headed the United Artists unit--until Jerry Weintraub took that post and Berger was reassigned to Ladd’s team at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Ladd, angered by the instability that came with Kerkorian’s persistent financial maneuvering, resigned as MGM/UA’s movie chief, while company Chairman Lee Rich and United Artists head Tony Thomopoulos left amid similar disputes.

Believing that he would ultimately run the movie company for Qintex or Turner, Berger stayed on under new MGM/UA Chairman Jeffrey Barbakow, a former Merrill Lynch investment banker.

Yet now he has no way of knowing whether Kerkorian will find a new buyer, or even a new movie chief in his stead, and is faced with perhaps the most difficult of all tasks for a studio executive--producing a quick fix, without making promises he can’t keep.

In the words of a top talent agent, who declined to be identified: “Dick is going to be around this town a lot longer than Kirk Kerkorian. He’s got to be concerned about getting into situations he can’t support.”

In their latest attempt to jump-start the studio, Berger and his staff so far have relied heavily on one of Hollywood’s oldest rules: Money talks.

MGM/UA dollars spoke loudly two weeks ago, when Berger persuaded Deutsch to produce an action-adventure film called “Timers” at his company, even though several stronger competitors, including Disney, were interested in the project.

In Hollywood parlance, Berger “preempted” the screenplay, written by Ian Seeberg and Valerie Bennett. He offered $350,000 for it but also threatened to withdraw the 48-hour offer by Friday morning so that rivals wouldn’t have a weekend to review the script and come in with competing bids.

With the script in hand, Berger immediately scheduled “Timers” for production next September and release the following summer, thus sending film makers a powerful second message: Desperate for product, MGM/UA intends to shoot what it buys.

To an extent, the maneuver worked. In the week following the “Timers” purchase, script and project submissions to the studio shot to 19, up from just five the week before. That number is still far short of the flow of projects at a hot studio, such as Disney, where the Touchstone unit alone might see as many as 75 a week and get first crack at material developed by or for stars with whom it has worked closely.

In a similar bid to keep MGM/UA’s distribution network intact, Berger also spent $9 million last month for North American rights to “Desperate Hours,” a film directed by Michael Cimino and produced by Dino De Laurentiis that will plug a gaping hole in the company’s release schedule this summer.

After the huge success of “Rain Man,” which was released in late 1988 and eventually brought in more than $170 million at the box office, MGM/UA released a series of small and often forgettable films such as “Kill Me Again” and “Survival Quest,” which did little more than keep the studio’s pilot light flickering while Kerkorian sought buyers.

(MGM/UA’s TV operation--which has three network series on the air, including “thirtysomething”--was affected less adversely than the film division, with its big capital requirements, by the failed buyout attempts, company officers say. MGM/UA posted a $2-million loss on $211.5 million in revenue for its fiscal first quarter ended Nov. 30. Television operations accounted for about 21% of the company’s revenue.)

MGM/UA is now looking to a pair of old reliables, the Rocky and James Bond series, for enough cash to fund productions beyond its current movie budget, which should cover about eight films.

“Rocky V” is currently shooting in Philadelphia and is scheduled for release next Christmas. It is being directed by John Avildsen, who also directed the original “Rocky,” and will star Sylvester Stallone as a sagging heavyweight who coaches a young understudy with some distinctly Rocky-esque traits.

The 18th James Bond film, starring Timothy Dalton, will be shot later this year, according to studio officers. While the Bond films have been consistent moneymakers in world markets, the last one, “Licence to Kill,” took in only about $35 million at the U.S. box office.

Even if those pictures hit big, however, the studio’s past missteps may confine Berger, as one former MGM/UA officer puts it, to “working the edges” of the film business.

The studio’s development pool dwindled to about 40 scripts, compared to more than 200 for healthier competitors such as Warner Bros., as executives from Qintex operated as a shadow administration, overseeing the movie operation while they sought financing for a planned buyout last year.

Berger and his cohorts will release “Stanley & Iris,” starring Jane Fonda and Robert DeNiro, on Feb. 9, and still have projects in the works with a handful of Hollywood’s best names, among them John Candy, Steve Martin and Sally Field. Yet MGM/UA officers are haunted by movies that slipped away during the last year.

“It’s sad but true that the biggest picture of last weekend, ‘Driving Miss Daisy,’ was here,” noted Barry Lorie, a three-year company veteran who last month was named head of marketing. “Daisy,” produced by the Zanuck Co., was distributed by Warner Bros.

Similarly, “Child’s Play II,” the sequel to a successful MGM/UA film, will be released by Universal, because Qintex officers shied away from funding horror films. And MGM/UA recently let Columbia pick up another high-profile project, “Prince of Tides,” which was being developed by Barbra Streisand but grew too expensive for Berger’s fairly limited film budget.

Much like Ladd, who is now chairman of Pathe Entertainment, Berger has a reputation as a straightforward deal maker and, in a phrase repeated by several Hollywood insiders, as a “nice guy.”

The son of a former Ziegfeld girl and a theatrical producer, Berger graduated from the UCLA business school and married into show business with his first wife, actress Meredith MacRae. He became a certified public accountant before going on to work in both the film and television divisions at Fox, and then later at CBS.

Despite his strong relations with producers and agents, Berger acknowledges that he can’t even broach the topic of long-term relationships in a film community that still hasn’t forgiven Kerkorian for simply severing his producer deals with Norman Jewison (“Moonstruck”), Richard Zanuck (“Cocoon”), David Kirschner (“Child’s Play”) and others in a 1988 cost-cutting move.

“I would love to have Jewison here. But we’re not going to bother about that,” Berger said.

Instead, MGM/UA will have to rely on its ability to buy strong scripts, which in turn may attract talent despite the studio’s uncertain future. In Berger’s words, “Jewison will work with us on a one-shot basis if we have a script that he likes.”

Thirty-one-year-old John Goldwyn, a Berger lieutenant whose grandfather, Samuel, helped give MGM its name, put it a bit differently.

“Everybody likes to talk big about how we’re not in business,” Goldwyn said. “But, boy, are they grateful to hear the company is prepared to write checks.”

MGM/UA RELEASES, 1989-90

Movie Ticket sales

Licence to Kill: $34,626,700

Road House: 29,981,580

All Dogs Go to Heaven: 23,895,398

Leviathan: 15,692,760

The January Man: 4,605,437

The Mighty Quinn: 4,551,142

A Dry White Season: 3,557,880

Gone With the Wind (re-issue): 2,111,683

The Horror Show: 1,379,660

True Love: 1,043,303