Little-Known Longbow Shoots a Bull’s-Eye

The invitation to tonight’s premiere of the HBO Pictures film “A Private Matter” at the Directors Guild Theater lays it out . . . semi-ominously, it would seem:

In 1962 an abortion divided the country. History is about to repeat itself.

Exactly what part of history--or what abortion--may miraculously be about to be repeated is left to the invitee’s imagination. But what is clear is that the drums are beating again for another of those fact-based television dramas that HBO seems lovingly to back.

And why not beat the drums? After all, it is an election year.

There is a certain abortion case circling the Supreme Court.

So why not reach back to the agonies of 30 years ago and to the television personality Sherri Finkbine--”Miss Sherri” of “Romper Room” in Scottsdale, Ariz.--and her attempt to abort her fetus cruelly brutalized by the drug thalidomide? Her search for an abortion crossed state borders and international boundaries and became for many the seminal event in the nation’s continuing debate over abortion.

Now all that drama and all those events plus Sissy Spacek and Aidan Quinn. Estelle Parsons, too, and director Joan Micklin Silver. Most of us won’t get to see the movie until June 20 when HBO will first show it, but like history it will repeat several times in the following weeks.

Ronnie Clemmer and Bill Pace, executive producers of “A Private Matter” and virtual Hollywood newcomers, may very well hope that a certain part of their professional history doesn’t get repeated in the process.

About a year ago their Longbow Productions of Studio City, not yet 4 years old and with no production credits, saw their anticipated first three movie properties go into turn-around within days of each other. Turn-around translated means the Dumpster . . . changed corporate minds . . . canceled plans.

But here we are a year later and the days of summer, indeed, are heady for Longbow.

The company’s first movie, “A Mother’s Justice,” did find a pick-up and was broadcast late last year by NBC. The producer’s second project, “A Private Matter,” eventually moved from low-budget HBO Showcase across the hall to higher-budgeted HBO Pictures. And a deal with Penny Marshall to make the feature “A League of Their Own,” went from 20th Century Fox to Columbia and now, just 10 days after “A Private Matter” is first shown on HBO, “A League of Their Own” goes into theaters on July 1.

Choice may be an abortion issue buzzword. But it has a special meaning for Clemmer and Pace.

Call it the Partnership Strategy, making the right choices.

The two producers came out of the Midwest and East Coast television with journalism backgrounds. But they had reached a point in their careers where they wanted to put their journalism and television experiences together and go forth to make what they call fact-based movies. But journalism doesn’t always provide a financial base for such private enterprise. They needed a financial partner and they found him in Richard Kughn, a Detroit businessman and developer (one of his companies owns the Beverly Center) they had met while working on the syndicated “P.M. Magazine” where Clemmer was host. Their 65-page business plan persuaded Kughn, and a three-way equal partnership was formed.

With a business plan and a batch of fact-based dramas in mind, they went west to set up shop. They were literally Hollywood strangers. No family connections. No familiar names. No mail-room buddies. No Ivy League school chums. Not even a Beverly Hills post office address as they set themselves up in a house on Longbow Drive in Sherman Oaks.

They learned fast, though, that if you’re not connected, you get connected.

You find other partners, people with recognizable names and sturdy credits. And if that works, you may in fact spend your evenings at Hollywood premieres.

For the Meredith Baxter NBC movie “A Mother’s Justice” they linked up with the experienced Green/Epstein Productions.

For “A Private Matter” they found a godfather in veteran movie maker Sydney Pollack and his Mirage Enterprises.

For “A League of Their Own” they linked up with Penny Marshall and her Parkway Productions.

They first learned about Sherri Finkbine and her private matter from a Washington Post article five years ago. They were too young to remember anything about the celebrated case but her situation, they believed, deserved to be told through a movie, particularly a television movie.

She had resisted movie and book offerings for her story. But Clemmer and Pace were able to persuade her that their project would be a true telling and that the time was right for that telling. Their script by William Nicholson caught the attention of HBO Showcase but the $2-million budget wasn’t enough to get the stars and the director. With Sydney Pollack helping them, they were able to move to HBO Pictures and to find the $4-million budget that could buy them the cast and director they wanted.

A newspaper article about a reunion of a World War II women’s baseball team led them to “A League of Their Own.” The two producers flew to the Ft. Wayne, Ind., reunion to meet the board of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Players Assn. and eight months later had wrapped up the movie rights to the players’ history. They were about to hire a writer and get their project started, they say, when they got a telephone call from actor-director Penny Marshall. She, too, had heard about the women’s baseball players but when she started negotiating for their story she was told Longbow had the rights.

Longbow?

Her phone call led to a meeting, the meeting led to an agreement. Marshall’s company would make the movie, the Longbows would be producers.

“To show we weren’t brain damaged we agreed to join her project,” Clemmer says.

“The bottom line,” Pace says, “is that a partnership had to be made and ultimately decisions would be made by Penny. Why would we want to compete with her? When we first got the rights we thought about her as the director but knew we could never afford her.”

What these last two partnerships have done for Clemmer and Pace is something a lot of Hollywood producers can only occasionally dream about.

They got their movies made.

They had a godfather in Pollack and an apprenticeship in filmmaking with Marshall.

And with a moneyed partner in Detroit and after almost five years in Studio City they think they just may be about to become overnight sensations.

“We are guys who have tasted the waters that for most have been like a mirage in the desert,” says Pace. “We have credibility to go out on our own.”

And so much for the Hollywood partnership strategy. With their Detroit partner they have a development fund to acquire more of their own scripts. They have several feature and television movies under consideration . . . without godfathers or partners . . . and in most cases, fact-based movies.

They expect “A Private Matter” to generate interest not only in their company but most importantly toward the issue of choice. They believe the movie will disturb only “the doctrinaire extremists” on both sides of the abortion issue.

“It won’t serve political goals,” Clemmer says, “because it’s a balanced look and an honest look. We have adhered to (veteran television producer) Fred Friendly’s belief that the point is not to promote a position. The point is to make the agony of decision-making so intense that the only way out is to make it.”

To make it. That is, after all, why they came West.