‘Midnight’ Dawns

For every high-profile, multimillion-dollar book sale in Hollywood by best-selling authors like John Grisham and Michael Crichton, there are countless manuscripts whose path to the big screen follows a far different plot line.

Nearly four years ago, everyone had passed on the film rights to John Berendt’s then unknown, nonfiction book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” a quirky tale about the aftermath of a true-life murder in Savannah, Ga. The esoteric nature of the story, about a high-society antiques dealer accused of murdering his live-in hustler lover, doesn’t exactly translate into mainstream studio fare.

That didn’t dissuade Arnold Stiefel.

Stiefel, 53, a former talent agent and book publisher who’s a power broker in the music business managing the careers of such pop stars as Rod Stewart, Toni Braxton and Scott Weiland, coughed up $25,000--a modest amount in Hollywood--to option the material.

Since then the book has remained, remarkably, on the New York Times’ hard-cover bestseller list for more than three years. Now, it’s a studio movie for Warner Bros., directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Kevin Spacey, and opens nationwide this weekend.

Stiefel, credited as the film’s producer, first discovered the book from his younger sister, Anita Zuckerman, who gave up a career as a litigator with a prestigious Century City law firm to run the movie side of his production company.

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He recalls the day in early January 1994 when Zuckerman told him she couldn’t make a lunch meeting.

“She said, ‘I can’t go. I’m reading,’ ” he said.

When Zuckerman told him that she was reading galleys for a book just weeks before its publication and that everyone in Hollywood had passed on acquiring the movie rights, he was elated.

“These galleys had even been turned down by Betty White Productions,” Stiefel joked, in his raspy baritone. “The studio readers hated it so much, the coverage ran the gamut from dismissive to angry.”

Zuckerman said, “I was so riveted by that first paragraph, I sat without moving until Page 50,” at which point she called the author’s agent to make sure the book rights weren’t already promised. Hardly.

Berendt’s movie agent, Trisha Davey at International Creative Management, had only one potential low-ball offer on the table from a TV company, and her client was insisting on a feature deal.

“There wasn’t one producer who fell in love with it,” Davey recalled. “When Arnold and Anita came in, I knew it was for them.”

At Zuckerman’s urging, Stiefel read the book overnight and made a $25,000 offer good only until noon the next day.

“Everyone laughed, since who was I bidding against?” Stiefel recounted. “Then, when I added bestseller escalator clauses [which pay a writer bonuses based on each week a book stays on the bestseller list], they really had a laugh.”

Asked why he made a larger-than-necessary offer, Stiefel said he had wanted to make a statement to the agency world that his company was serious about acquiring smart literary material for the movies. (He’s now aggressively pursuing the movie rights to Dominick Dunne’s much-talked-about new book, “Another City, Not My Own,” based on the author’s personal account of the O.J. Simpson murder trial.)

“I hadn’t made a movie in a while, and we were thought of as a music company,” said Stiefel, whose few producer credits include director Jonathan Demme’s celebrated 1984 concert movie, “Stop Making Sense,” TriStar Pictures’ 1986 comedy hit “About Last Night . . . “ and Warner Bros.’ 1990 box-office flop “Graffiti Bridge,” starring and directed by his then-client Prince.

Shortly after optioning the material, Stiefel called two executives he considers among the smartest in the business--Sherry Lansing at Paramount and Lucy Fisher, then at Warner Bros.--to generate interest in the project. Lansing said she loved the book but didn’t see it as a movie. Fisher’s assistant sent Stiefel a form rejection letter.

“We then decided to just sit and wait and put all our energies into promoting the book,” said Stiefel, who began his career in publishing at age 18 as a junior publicist at Bantam Books in New York. Stiefel attributes everything he knows about promotion to Jacqueline Susann, with whom he worked at Bantam on the paperback marketing of “Valley of the Dolls,” “The Love Machine” and “Once Is Not Enough,” all of which became No. 1 bestsellers.

“Midnight in the Garden” was published in late January 1994, becoming an instant bestseller in Savannah. Word of mouth created a groundswell across the country, and by mid-March it had hit the New York Times’ hard-cover bestseller list, where it’s remained for 175 weeks and has sold more than 2 million copies.

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After the book became a national bestseller, Stiefel got an urgent call from Joel Silver, the high-octane producer of such action hits as the “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard” series.

Stiefel recalls Silver saying: “ ‘I can’t believe you have this book. I’m furious I didn’t get it. . . . Arnold, my Frank Lloyd Wright plantation is in South Carolina [between Charleston and Savannah]. . . . I have to have this.’ ”

Stiefel initially rebuffed Silver, who drew Warner Bros. into the project.

“What he finally came up with made the best economic sense,” Stiefel said. While Stiefel refused to discuss the particulars, sources say that when Warner Bros. bought the project from him, he received a sizable producer fee as well as an overall three-year deal at the studio.

Part of the Stiefel’s arrangement was that Silver wasn’t to be involved in the production and that his name was not to appear in the screen credits, other than his production company Silver Pictures.

When interviewed on “Charlie Rose Show” this summer, Silver simply referred to Stiefel as “the guy” who had purchased the rights to the book, without identifying him, and taking full credit for setting up the project.

When asked about the broadcast, Stiefel would only say, “I was disappointed, but I guess it goes with the territory.” Silver refused to comment.

Yet like Silver, Stiefel had little to do with the actual production of “Midnight in the Garden.” And though Zuckerman was physically present on the set in Savannah for the entire shoot, she was not consulted on any creative matters.

As is typical with any Eastwood movie, the director-producer runs the show with his crew from Malpaso Productions and his co-producer Tom Rooker.

“[Warner Bros. co-heads] Bob Daly and Terry Semel let me know how Clint works, so I immediately made the adjustment in my head that this was going to be Clint’s way or the highway,” Stiefel said.

Stiefel said his and Zuckerman’s greatest contribution was acquiring the book in the first place and developing the material with screenwriter John Lee Hancock, who, in turn, gave the script to Eastwood. The two had worked together on Warner’s 1993 movie “A Perfect World.”

Stiefel grew up in Philadelphia, where his father owned the famous Uptown Theater. After dropping out of high school, he joined the touring company of the Fantasticks but soon abandoned an acting career for publishing.

Shortly after moving to Hollywood in 1974 to become a literary agent at the Paul Kohner Agency, Stiefel launched his own agency, then worked at ICM and the William Morris Agency until Rod Stewart asked him to be his personal manager in 1983. His management-production company, Stiefel Entertainment, was created with a clientele that also included Matthew Broderick and Demme.

“As a kid growing up watching movies in my father’s theater, I dreamed one day of being a performer. My inability to sing, dance or act looks like it proved to be a blessing in disguise,” Stiefel said.

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