Off-Centerpiece : We’re Glad He Didn’t Take It Personally

By now, everyone in Hollywood knows what happened to Julia Phillips, the Oscar-winning producer who crashed and burned on drugs only to resurrect herself with the biting kiss-and-tell book “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.” But what of her ex-husband, Michael Phillips, with whom she produced a string of hits in the 1970s--”The Sting” (also with Tony Bill), “Taxi Driver” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”?

Michael Phillips, who has been noticeably absent from film credits since he made “The Flamingo Kid” in 1984, is having his own renaissance. While his ex-wife climbs the ladder of best-sellerdom, Phillips is releasing three major-studio movies over the next six months. “I do feel this is a new chapter in my life,” he says.

Compared to some of her other victims, Michael Phillips comes off relatively unscathed in his ex-wife’s book, though she frequently implies that he had very little to do with the success of their movies. And that, among other aspects of the book, rankles him.

“On a personal level, I was astonished,” said Phillips, who until this interview has refused to publicly discuss the book. “It was a pretty serious distortion of history.”

Phillips recalls that his ex-wife sent him a 900-page manuscript for his comments, but she lost the notes he made--in which he disputes many of her facts--and never altered her version of the events in her book. “I’m upset, and she knows it,” he says.

He adds, “She told me it was an angry book. But I was surprised by the level of anger in it.”

During the 1970s, Phillips, then a young law school graduate, and his then-wife Julia were at the top of the heap in Hollywood, hanging out with Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, making movies with Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. But their fast fame and fortune proved ephemeral.

Drugs aided Julia’s demise. The more strait-laced Michael produced three films with only mixed success, in the early 1980s--”Heartbeeps,” “Cannery Row” and “The Flamingo Kid.” He then devoted most of his energy to getting a production partnership with Michael Douglas off the ground--but Douglas dropped his commitment to the venture after his acting career took off. One friend of both Phillipses attributes their early meteoric rise in Hollywood to her creative energy and aggressiveness, combined with his legal and business acumen--but most of all to the youth and innocence that both shared.

Phillips insists his new films break from tired molds--but audiences will have to decide that. In Warner Bros.’ “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” Christina Applegate of “Married . . . With Children” fame stars in a comedy about a family who comes together when tragedy strikes. In Warners’ “Mom and Dad Save the World,” Teri Garr and Jeffrey Jones star in a zany extravaganza about a married couple who get whisked off to a planet that looks like a cross between the worlds of Dr. Seuss and Jules Verne. And John Travolta stars in Columbia’s “Eyes of an Angel” this fall.