Sterner Runs With ‘Other People’s Money’

You don’t usually see limos parked on Le Conte on the north edge of Westwood. Limos aren’t the normal mode of transportation for the fast-food folks of UCLA or those post-grads who occasionally frequent the Westwood Playhouse, especially since Stratton’s closed its doors there. But here were two limos, a stretch and a human-size model, plus a run-of-the-road Rolls.

On Le Conte you usually don’t see too many big Hollywood players, like a former studio owner or a top-line actor or a couple of prize-winning Hollywood composers popping out of limos. On a Tuesday night too, supposedly the loneliest night of the week for theater owners.

But that street scene has been repeating itself the past two weeks as the Westside crowd descends from the hillsides lured by the siren sound of money, in this case a little play called, teasingly enough, “Other People’s Money.”

The play, by 52-year-old Jerry Sterner, a former real estate syndicator who went from tax shelters to play writing, has been executing a strange and strong pull on audiences ever since it opened four years ago in a small theater in Teaneck, N.J.

Like limos on Le Conte.

Like ticket scalpers in downtown Pasadena. Toward the end of its recent 7-week run at the Pasadena Playhouse, the sidewalk on El Molino in front of the Pasadena Playhouse resembled the ticket hustle around the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.

Like a big Warner Bros. movie deal with director Norman Jewison and a cast including Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck and Piper Laurie.

Like Donald Trump seeing “Other People’s Money” when it opened in a small New York house and insisting it belonged on Broadway, offering to pay for its move there. Those days he could afford doing that. The play didn’t move, however. Sterner wanted it that way.

“It’s always better to make less longer,” Sterner the writer says. And he knows something about leveraging a deal.

It’s worked out that way for Sterner and the limited partnership he formed with first-time producers Jeff Ash and Susan Gallin to finance his first play. “Other People’s Money,” on one level the story of a hostile takeover of an aging Rhode Island company by New York corporate raider Lawrence Garfinkle, “Larry the Liquidator,” predated the financial scandals of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Today’s references to Drexel or to Ivan Boesky or to greenmail easily get laughs. In 1988 in New York those words could chill.

As a businessman Sterner had a hate relationship with theater because of what he sees as its stereotypical portrayals: the businessman as bumbling wimp or remorseless shark. “It was a conspiracy by left-wing college dropouts to destroy the capitalist system. I knew differently,” he says.

So he wrote what he calls an honest play about a businessman. (Up-front Garfinkle is not the personification of greed. He’s a player, a pursuer of money because it’s there.) Then he tried out his play in New Jersey, formed his partnership, primed his investors for a New York run and then suddenly, it was October, 1987. Wall Street fell, the investors fled, and Garfinkle stayed in Jersey.

By 1989, Wall Street felt better, the investors returned and “Other People’s Money” got to New York with Kevin Conway, its star and director, who even now in Westwood is doing double duty as Garfinkle. What happened next would bring smiles to Larry the Liquidators everywhere.

The little play now has 30 productions running in the United States, including San Francisco, Spokane and the Shakespeare festival in Oregon. It’s also in Houston, Dallas, four different houses in Florida and last week Rhode Island. It’s also playing in Brazil, India, South Africa, Italy and Sweden.

It bombed only in London, disappearing after 10 weeks and critical brutality, the only financial loss suffered by Garfinkle.

But somebody in Burbank loved it. Warner Bros. earlier bought the movie and television rights from Sterner. “I sold it for a flat fee, $325,000 plus a percentage deal and thanks to Art Buchwald I may get a percentage of the profits,” Sterner says.

Gross or net points?

“Net.”

Hmmmmmmmmm.

But don’t worry about Sterner, the businessman or the writer. He gets 10% of the gross from those 30 theater box offices in the United States plus those in other countries and turns 40% of that over to his investors. He is getting, in effect, a lot of other people’s money and returning what his businessmen friends say life is all about, a profit.

A year ago when the Pasadena Playhouse advertised its season, “Other People’s Money” was just a T.B.A., to be announced. It turned out to be S.R.O., according to the Playhouse’s executive director, Lars Hansen. The play became the biggest-selling show in the theater’s season. That’s why Hansen, seeing that less than half of his seats are filled by subscribers but the house was selling out, looked around for another theater. Ergo Westwood and all the limo traffic Le Conte can bear.

Why does a play about a doughnut-devouring, one-lining corporate raider who believes that “money is unconditional acceptance” and that life is “the survival of the fattest,” seem to get people who normally don’t go to theater to the theater?

Conway, the veteran Garfinkle: “It’s about money, romance and sex . . . things that are most appealing. It also forces audiences to think about their moral stand and where America is going in a business sense. Are we becoming a nation that will make only hamburgers?”

Hansen: “It’s a refresher course in business administration, yet it involves the audience in two points of view, those of the raider and his object.”

And this from one member of the Westwood audience: “It’s just like my office.”