Movies Don’t Get Made This Way, Normally

Most first-time writers wouldn’t have the chutzpah. And most seasoned Hollywood insiders wouldn’t even think to do it. But leave it to financial wizard and former New York City deputy mayor Ken Lipper--clearly a Hollywood outsider--to embark on crafting a script in such an unorthodox fashion.

Lipper, a Harvard Law School graduate who founded Lipper & Co., an investment management firm that manages some $3.5 billion in assets, had always been drawn to the written word, but he had no experience in scriptwriting.

Still, in 1987, Lipper decided he wanted to write a screenplay loosely based on his experiences as deputy to New York City Mayor Ed Koch. He had a germ of an idea: what the system does to politicians, how it blurs their conception of right and wrong.

That idea would later become “City Hall,” which opened Friday and stars Al Pacino, John Cusack, Bridget Fonda and Danny Aiello.

But before putting word one on the page, Lipper’s first step was to call on veteran director Oliver Stone, for whom he had served as technical advisor on “Wall Street.”

“I told Oliver Stone, ‘I want to write a screenplay and I need to know how to do it,’ ” Lipper said over breakfast recently. “I asked if he could send me the best modern film scripts to read so I could learn how it’s done well.”

And Stone obliged him.

“He sent me ‘The Godfather 1 and 2’ and ‘Chinatown,’ ” Lipper said. “I read them and studied how they were implemented by watching the movies. And if you look at my script I really believe you’ll see the influence of those films.”

After Lipper’s “Wall Street” experience, he was so captivated by filmmaking that he wanted to attempt telling a story of his own.

Over the ensuing three years, Lipper, true to his original course, wrote his script on weekends while heading up his investment firm during the week.

He sent an early copy to Stone, who gave him still more advice.

“He said it was too Capraesque,” Lipper recalled. “He told me it had to be more surreal.”

Lipper ultimately wrote three drafts. He then spent the next five years working as a producer to get the film made.

“Part of it was something I’d done all my life: making deals and transactions,” Lipper said. “I understood budgets, costs, contracts, all the things that confuse and harm people. That made a lot of difference. I was able to understand how projects get put together and to compromise and not be pigheaded. . . . The other element is something I’ve always loved and that’s writing.”

Lipper is credited as screenwriter and producer on the film, which was made by Castle Rock for about $50 million.

“City Hall” also had some heavy hitters assist the writing process, which Lipper is quick to point out. In 1991 Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver”) and Nicholas Pileggi (“Casino”) began working on the screenplay and, finally, Bo Goldman (“Scent of a Woman”).

Along the way, Lipper has emerged as a virtual Hollywood insider. He is writing a film for producer Brian Grazer that deals with the Mafia and white-collar crime, scheduled to begin shooting early next year. He recently dined with Mel Gibson and has hobnobbed with Mike Ovitz and Mike Eisner.

But suggest that he’s a real Hollywood player now and Lipper just lets go a hearty, good-natured laugh.

“I don’t know about that,” Lipper said. “This has definitely been a socialization process. And it took me quite a while to adapt to it. I had to learn the language. But once I learned the language I was OK.”

Lipper, who will wax on about the themes of “Antigone” and refer to Aristotelian logic when talking movies, was set on mastering a new field.

“I am sorely educable,” he said. “And that was the fun of it to me. I was buying and selling stocks for a living, so the excitement of this was learning something new.”

In 1989, Lipper had shown the screenplay to producer Ed Pressman, whom he had met on “Wall Street.” Pressman--who has also produced “Reversal of Fortune” and “The Crow,” among other films--saw commercial potential in it and signed on as co-producer, investing $300,000 into the making of the picture, as did Lipper.

The two began a partnership that continues now that “City Hall” is completed. Their next project will be the movie adaptation of “Indecent Exposure,” a book by David McClintick about the 1970s embezzlement scandal at Columbia Pictures involving studio head David Begelman.

“We met and became friends when he was working on ‘Wall Street,’ ” Pressman said. “He told me he was working on this and when he showed me the script, I felt it had potential to be a terrific movie. The ideas were all there, but the actual execution of dialogue and structure was still very primitive at that point. But Ken’s enthusiasm and commitment to this as a writer and producer was unbridled.”

So contagious was that enthusiasm that Pressman agreed to do things in an unorthodox fashion suggested by Lipper.

“The single condition was not to take money up front and not to lose control of it,” Lipper said. “Many of the studios wanted to pay us substantial money to purchase and develop the screenplay, hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. But then they would own it and they could do whatever they wanted with it. I said, ‘Listen, I don’t want your money. What I want is to let you have the screenplay for free, give you an option, but you must put it into production within the next six months.’ ”

In other words, Lipper did not want to sell the script only to have it languish unmade for years. If a studio had not taken serious steps to begin production--such as hiring a director, setting up a schedule and budget, etc.--at the end of six months, then the script would revert back to Lipper and Pressman for further peddling.

“The studio executives were appalled,” Lipper said. “I had studio executives and vice presidents saying, ‘We don’t do it this way. This is a violation of precedent.’ Or, ‘We’ll make it. You have to have faith. We have to have relationships.’ And I said, ‘No. You have to have relationships.’ I own this.”

“City Hall” is about “a moment in a good man’s life which destroys everything that came before,” a concept that had long fascinated Lipper.

From the outset, Lipper had pictured the main role of that good man, the fictional New York City Mayor John Pappas, to go to his childhood friend, Al Pacino. The two had grown up together in the Bronx but lost touch when they were 15. They kept in touch sporadically over the following 40 years.

But Pressman had urged Lipper not to show the script to Pacino until it was in its finished form. He ultimately did and Pacino signed on.

Prior to the making of the film, Lipper took Pacino, Cusack, Schrader and Pileggi around to meet the key players in the world of New York City politics.

Ultimately, Lipper found his experience in politics served him exceedingly well in Hollywood, possibly better than his business expertise had.

“Without the grounding in city government, I would have been a lost soul,” Lipper said. “Hollywood is the closest thing to the political environment that I’ve ever been in. It’s highly personalized, and there are relatively undefined standards as to how to judge things. So, as a result, it takes a very skilled person to kind of interpolate the standards as he’s going along. Hollywood is a people business, just like politics. You learn that a deal isn’t a deal just because somebody says ‘yes.’ “*