Optician to the Stars Has Eye for a Trend

In the old days, no movie prop could rival a cigarette for versatility or sexuality. But times change.

Smoking is out now, and sensitivity is in. Myopia is no longer unmanly, or even unwomanly; these days leading men routinely make passes at girls who wear glasses.

Thus, a Billy Crystal movie-in-progress called “Mr. Saturday Night” has already spent $20,000 on wearable spectacles.

“That’s so far,” says Cheryl Shuman, who collected this sum. “I just got a call on Friday; they need 20 more pairs.”

Thus are California fortunes made.

Shuman is the one responsible for an awful lot of the glasses you see in movies nowadays, as well as a good many on TV. “Barton Fink,” “Pretty Woman,” “Postcards From the Edge,” “Thelma and Louise,” “Cape Fear,” “Bugsy, “Terminator II,” not to mention “L.A. Law,” “Cheers” and “Murphy Brown,” have all relied on the same peripatetic optician.

A lot of work has gone into Cheryl Shuman. There is the dramatic makeup, the Mercedes 500SL convertible and the 6,000-square-foot home atop Sherman Oaks. It’s a long way from the coal-mining country of southern Ohio, whence she came.

You can lay Shuman’s success to changing times, serendipity or the excesses of Hollywood. For a timely suggestion, her mother gets the credit. But do not underestimate Shuman’s toughness or wit. She recovered fully from an auto accident that nearly killed her, and in her 30s now, she has made it by making house calls to movie sets all over town.

Schuman got into eyeglasses half a dozen years ago, and her timing was perfect. In Hollywood, where heavy reading often amounts to a long script, wearing glasses was becoming so fashionable that people with perfect vision wanted them. Shuman says she’s made glasses with plain glass for Paula Abdul, for example.

“She’s like a personal trainer,” says Joseph Bruneni, a Torrance-based consultant to the optical industry. “She gets top dollar.”

When actor Robert Downey Jr. was making the comedy “Soapdish,” for example, he insisted that Shuman be kept on hand to “fit” his eyeglasses for the production. For this arduous task she billed $2,000 a day--for 10 days.

Besides, with a firm grip on the bridge of Hollywood’s nose--she has 4,000 prescriptions on file for the likes of Jack Nicholson, Michael Douglas and Meryl Streep--Shuman is sometimes paid by frame-makers to get their wares into pictures. Several eye wear firms even pay her a retainer--she says one such deal is worth $250,000--for advice on trends.

Shuman insists that this doesn’t overly influence the frames she pushes, and that her first consideration in her work is what’s best for the movie.

Americans spent $11.5 billion on eyeglasses and contact lenses in 1989, Bruneni says, about $1.7 billion of that in California. But unlike the rest of us, movie stars don’t just have a pair or two. Shuman says close-ups work best with special flat lenses, but these don’t look quite right from the side, so the rest of the time actors wear regular glasses. And since production delays are costly, Shuman provides a backup of each pair, lest it break or disappear.

So Shuman made four sets for Michael Keaton in “Batman II,” all prescription. Then she made four more for his stand-in, who fills Keaton’s shoes while the crew works out the lighting for each shot. On action films, they can run through eyeglasses by the fistful.

At $500 a pair, this is expensive, but producers apparently find it worthwhile.

“She’s the best,” says Peter Schindler, co-producer of “Mr. Saturday Night.” “She’s able to come up with whatever frame you need.”

If necessary, she’ll do it at 4 a.m. too. Shuman claims to wear a beeper 24 hours a day and is known to take Hollywood’s whims in stride. The laboratories that make her lenses can do the job in 10 minutes.

For the film “Grand Canyon,” Shuman responded to a call on her cellular phone by spreading 4,000 frames across the floor of a Century City hotel room for Steve Martin, Danny Glover, Kevin Kline and others--on an hour’s notice.

Most of the time, though, Shuman can narrow things down in advance, based on a look at the script or a character sketch.

“She has a fashion designer’s eye for making eye wear coordinate with your persona,” says Alan Thicke, the myopic star of “Growing Pains” on ABC.

Sometimes the hard part is persuading stars diplomatically that the glasses they want in a film make them look silly.

“It’s not like a watch or a sweater,” she says. “It’s on your face.”

Shuman had been modeling and entering beauty pageants but became an optician--at the longstanding suggestion of her mother--after the fateful events of Dec. 2, 1983. That was the day on which Shuman went through the windshield of an automobile, an accident that was supposed to leave her crippled as well as disfigured.

It didn’t, but when she came to California she needed a job, and took one at a tony optical shop in Encino. There she helped a prop man who wanted to see a couple of frames. Shuman says she offered to deliver 200 or 300 frames after work, and quickly recognized a business opportunity.

A few years ago, Shuman branched into real estate. She got a broker’s license, which saves on commissions and gives her access to the Multiple Listing System, and has bought three houses at fire-sale prices.

In the future, though, it’ll be more glasses--a line of her own, Shuman says, which might help her achieve her goal.

“I want to retire by the time I’m 35,” she says. And then what? She laughs: “I’ll just do lunch.”