A Hollywood Segue: Fashion to Screen

Movie producers are often known to overextend themselves, but it’s a rare day when one arm wrestles with dress patterns and the other with 40-foot killer snakes.

But then, most producers aren’t like Carole Little and her friends.

Little, the namesake of a $200-million Los Angeles-based fashion empire, has built her reputation with name-brand clothing for juniors and women. But now she is also known as the producer of “Anaconda,” a $50-million adventure about a giant Amazonian reptile that preys on a boatload of filmmakers.

While top designers are forever flirting with Hollywood (witness Isaac Mizrahi in “Unzipped”), the segue from fashion to action mogul may strike some as awkward--or worse, as fodder for bad puns involving boas. The over-the-top “Anaconda” is being billed, after all, as “ ‘Jaws’ with snakes.”

But the new job suits her, Little says.

“Film is a love of mine,” she says in an interview at her spare, loft-style offices just south of downtown Los Angeles. “I’m interested in the creative part: the photography, costumes, makeup. . . . I don’t care about the technical part of it.”

Indeed, the 58-year-old Little had minimal day-to-day involvement with the movie, starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube and Jon Voight, which was financed and is being distributed by Columbia Pictures.

That job was borne mostly by her fellow producers--Little’s business partner and estranged husband, Leonard Rabinowitz, and his former girlfriend, Verna Harrah--along with executive producer Susan Ruskin and director Luis Llosa.

Still, “Anaconda” marks Little’s official plunge into high-stakes filmmaking, and she and the other producers stand to profit handsomely if it turns into a hit.

According to Rabinowitz, the couple’s deal with Columbia stipulates that they will collect at least 5% of “Anaconda’s” box-office gross--terms typically reserved for much more seasoned filmmakers. A studio source, however, said that the couple’s profit participation would not begin until the film “reaches the break-even point.” “Anaconda” took the No. 1 box-office spot with $16.5 million in ticket sales its opening weekend.

Little and Rabinowitz, 48, are already developing future projects through their St. Tropez Films, while Harrah--the widow of gambling magnate William F. Harrah--has bought out most of their stake in CL Cinema Line Films Corp., the production company behind “Anaconda.”

Indeed, the story of “Anaconda” could serve as a primer for would-be producers from outside the movie business. As important as skill and determination are in Hollywood, Little and friends have amply demonstrated that connections and an independent cash supply certainly help.

Not surprisingly, the filmmaking process also led to a parting of ways, at least professionally, between Harrah and her erstwhile partners.

“Show business has a way,” Rabinowitz says with a cryptic smile, “of separating strange bedfellows.”

Those bedfellows shared a dream. Rabinowitz and Harrah lived together for five years until last December, during which time Hans Bauer’s original “Anaconda” script was bought, sent through several drafts (the writing team of Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr. would eventually share credit with Bauer) and shot on location for 16 weeks in the Brazilian jungle and the Arboretum in Arcadia.

Meanwhile, Rabinowitz and Little were still technically married (their divorce will be final this summer) and working side-by-side as co-chairmen of privately held Carole Little Inc., the 23-year-old clothing company with showrooms nationwide. Rabinowitz, an energetic and talkative New Yorker, takes care of business issues, which leaves Little free to focus on the creative side. Despite the pending divorce, they have remained close friends.

But Rabinowitz, a self-professed fan of technical gadgetry, always longed to get involved in movies. In 1991, he served as executive producer on “The End of Innocence,” a low-budget drama directed by and starring his friend Dyan Cannon. Little designed the costumes.

Rabinowitz soon pulled Harrah, who was recovering from a kidney transplant, into Cinema Line, the movie company he and Little had formed. Ruskin, a veteran producer who worked closely with actor Gene Wilder, found the script for “Anaconda,” which Cinema Line snapped up in late 1993.

“It was commercial, very commercial,” Harrah, 52, says of the script. “Susan knew this is the kind of movie I really love. I’m a big fan of ‘Alien’ and science-fiction movies.”

Rabinowitz hired Hollywood power lawyer Jake Bloom, who in 1994 helped Cinema Line cut a three-year, first-look deal with Columbia (the pact, which resulted in “Anaconda,” has since expired).

After arduous rewriting--and a tense period when an Amazon drought delayed production for several months--shooting finally started in mid-1996. Llosa led a crew of 200 on five work barges and other craft floating off the Brazilian city of Manaus. Harrah, who kept close tabs on the location shoot, was attacked by squirrel monkeys one night at her hotel.

Little, busy with a new collection, stayed home, catching up with the filmmakers later at the Arboretum, where they rigged a pair of Animatronic snakes, one measuring 40 feet and weighing a ton.

Not long after shooting wrapped, however, the producers had split, with Harrah buying out all but 5% of Little and Rabinowitz’s stake in Cinema Line. Rabinowitz says he and Little wanted to leverage their own money and contacts to gain more control over future projects, while Harrah favored continuing with studio deals.

Harrah says, however, that she and her former partners had a more fundamental creative difference: She preferred crowd-pleasers that would interest the studios, while Little and Rabinowitz aimed to make art movies. Rabinowitz acknowledges “some tension” between the two camps.

Whatever its box-office fate, “Anaconda” can’t be accused of being too high-brow. No one knows that better than Little, who says her own taste runs to small, arty films like “Sling Blade” and “Lone Star.”

But that doesn’t bother her, she adds. Twenty-plus years in the fashion business have taught her about tailoring personal taste for mass consumption.

Clad in a chic, waist-length black leather jacket and matching stretch pants, the designer notes: “If I designed what I would wear, I wouldn’t be sitting here, I’d be in a garret somewhere. My taste is very rarefied.”