‘Wolves’ Financier Jake Eberts Makes a Very Decisive Move : Movies: The Canadian money man has turned his talents to producing with ‘City of Joy.’

If prizes were awarded for the best-titled autobiography, I might incline toward Alec Guinness for “Blessings in Disguise,” which says it all about very private people who become actors because they can hide by pretending to be a lot of somebody elses.

A close second prize would go, in my judgment, to Jake Eberts for “My Indecision Is Final,” a charmingly paradoxical line that would fit another whole class of people I know, quite possibly including the man in the mirror. The reservation is that the title may not fit Eberts himself, who on brief acquaintance strikes you as approximately as indecisive as an IBM mainframe.

Eberts’ autobiography--he is presently engaged on a sequel volume--essentially chronicles his part in the spectacular rise, although not the spectacular fall, of Goldcrest Films, a London production firm that he founded and that for a few shining years could do no wrong. John Carpenter’s “Escape From New York,” Joe Dante’s “The Howling” and, perhaps most memorably, the David Puttnam-Hugh Hudson “Chariots of Fire” were among the films it backed. So were “Local Hero,” “Gandhi,” “The Killing Fields” and “The Dresser.” For that little time, Oscar seemed to acquire a British accent.

(Totting up his whole career, including this year’s Academy Awards, Eberts reckons that the films he has helped finance have had 60 Oscar nominations and 19 Oscars.)

Then, like a successful wildcatter who expands extravagantly just as the law of averages is overtaking him, Goldcrest could suddenly no longer buy a hit, could not, as the saying almost goes, find its bottom line with two hands. Eberts, a Canadian who had seen the lean company he started take directions he didn’t agree with but could not control, stepped down after six years.

He was lured back in briefly but it was too late to find fresh capital and Goldcrest collapsed in 1986, undone not least by the massive cost overruns on “Revolution,” the most expensive film Goldcrest had ever undertaken, and by its scathing reviews and total failure at the box office.

Eberts, who somewhat resembles a younger, trimmer and far from inane Terry-Thomas, spent a brief time with Norman Lear and Jerry Perenchio’s Embassy Films, overseeing John Boorman’s “The Emerald Forest,” which Eberts had brought with him from Goldcrest.

He left Embassy after it was sold to Coca-Cola and in 1986 formed Allied Filmmakers, which develops, packages and consults about films. It was the European money Eberts raised by territorial sales that enabled “Driving Miss Daisy” to be made despite the penny-foolish timidity of Hollywood studios.

Eberts met Kevin Costner while he was still trying to finance “Dances With Wolves” and, deeply impressed by Costner’s exhaustive plans and conceptions for the film he’d been developing for three years even then, undertook to sell it in Europe, where, Eberts said during a recent quick visit to Los Angeles, “It is going through the roof.”

After his years as the man well behind the scenes, Eberts is for the first time producing a film, Roland Joffe’s version of the Dominique Lapierre novel, “City of Joy” which is causing a furor in Calcutta, where it is being shot.

Eberts and Joffe began discussing the book when Joffe was doing “The Killing Fields.” The novel was about a priest working among the Calcutta poor. The joy of the title was the priest’s discovery that there could be joy in having nothing material, but peace, a shared affection and religious consolation. The novel was widely attacked in India as exploiting the poverty and now the film is being attacked by politicians, intellectuals and the press on the same grounds.

Eberts, of course, disagrees and shares the novelist’s inspiration about the poor and those who work among them. (The priest has been replaced by Patrick Swayze as a callow young American doctor, a lesser figure in the book, who comes to his own new awareness of the real world.)

“City of Joy” is scheduled as a Christmas release for Tri-Star.

Also in production under Eberts’ banner is Bruce Beresford’s “Black Robe,” about the 17th-Century Jesuit missionaries in Canada and the extravagant ordeals they suffered for their faith.

Eberts, Montreal-born, took a degree in chemical engineering at McGill and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, worked for several years on Wall Street and eventually was managing director of a merchant banking firm in London. One of his tasks was raising money for the fine animated feature “Watership Down.”

The taste of film was, as it often is, addicting. The next year he founded Goldcrest.

The chanciest part of what he does, Eberts says, is developing projects. “That’s where I take risks,” he says. “If we’re financing an $18-million film, by then we have the script, the director, the cast. It’s a lot more money at the front end, but a lot less risk. I know what I can get for the film in Italy, a million and a half in France, and so on. On ‘Wolves,’ I knew that Kevin was in a beer commercial in Japan. ‘No Way Out’ and ‘Bull Durham’ were hits over there. You had to know they’d go for ‘Wolves’ in a big way.”

One of the projects he has under his wing is “The Thief and the Cobbler,” an animated feature that Richard Williams has been working on for more than 20 years, and tantalizing glimpses of which have been shown to animation groups. Williams should now be able to finish it at long last.

Eberts says his basic film philosophy is simple:

“I like stories that could be true. ‘Gandhi,’ ‘Chariots of Fire’ were true. ‘Dances With Wolves’ could be true; ‘Black Robe.’ But whatever you do, you have to have heart for it. It’s a business that keeps you up all night long more nights than not. If you don’t have the heart for it, you’re sunk.”