Mogul Is Reborn as Independent Film Producer

Last week in San Francisco on the set of “Two Goldsteins on Acid,” Hollywood titan-turned-producer Sid Sheinberg had an epiphany.

While watching a scene with Alicia Witt, the young star of the low-budget comedy, he noticed something amiss and summoned the woman in charge of wardrobe.

“My God,” thought the former president of MCA Inc. “I’ve gone from running a $7-billion company to getting a bra strap straight.”

After nearly four decades as one of Hollywood’s most powerful executives, Sheinberg, 64, has been reborn as a producer of films with budgets that wouldn’t cover the custom trailers, chartered jets and personal trainers required to pamper stars of the big-budget films he once oversaw. And Sheinberg says it’s exactly what he wants to be doing.

By bankrolling his own films, Sheinberg said, he’s “violating cardinal rule [No.] 1 of Hollywood: Never use your own money.” In a town where finding someone else to pick up the tab is a fine art, Sheinberg instead is putting his own funds on the line.

He’s in talks with Imperial Bank to help finance three low-budget movies, but so far no deal has been struck. Undaunted, he’s writing the checks required to plunge ahead on “Two Goldsteins,” his first film, even though no distributor is lined up. The direct production cost is about $2.7 million, and the film is halfway through its 25-day shoot.

“To a certain degree, I missed the really in-depth involvement in the details of filmmaking,” Sheinberg said, explaining why he’s been drawn back to it even though he could be loafing at his Malibu home as one of the colony’s richest retirees.

“I enjoy the details. I enjoy coming up with ideas for improving the script, changing scenes and deciding what locations and wardrobe should be--the process of making a film,” he said in an interview at his office at Bubble Factory. The company is a production boutique that he and his two sons, Jon and Bill, founded in 1995 and run out of the Beverly Hills building they bought that once housed a savings and loan.

Tastefully decorated, the third- floor office has a comfortable, living room-like feel, thanks to Sheinberg’s wife, actress Lorraine Gary. Sheinberg’s office is a far cry from the button-down corporate environment he was used to for 38 years at MCA’s headquarters in Universal City, where he nurtured the careers of such young directors as Steven Spielberg.

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It’s been nearly four years since the legendary regime of Sheinberg and his longtime boss, Lew Wasserman, ended in July 1995 at MCA, since renamed Universal Studios Inc. They were shoved aside as part of a wholesale housecleaning by Seagram Co. Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman Jr., after his family’s Canadian liquor business bought 80% of the entertainment giant for $5.7 billion.

Sheinberg, one of Hollywood’s blunter executives, makes no secret of his bitterness toward Bronfman, who, in his view, has systematically “destroyed” a once great company through chronic executive turnover and strategic missteps.

For their part, Seagram executives argue that they inherited a company that had failed to keep up with such aggressive rivals as Walt Disney Co., News Corp., Viacom Inc. and Time Warner Inc.

Some of the film duds during Bronfman’s reign were produced by Sheinberg, who had negotiated a lucrative, unusually independent production deal as part of his settlement. Seagram ended up paying Sheinberg and his sons $35 million to get rid of their production arrangement at the studio, after a string of box-office flops such as “McHale’s Navy,” “A Simple Wish,” “That Old Feeling” and “Flipper,” a film they were brought in to supervise.

Their last disappointment, “For Richer or Poorer,” starring Tim Allen and Kirstie Alley, was released in December 1997. Since then, the Sheinbergs have, like dozens of other producers, struggled to get studios excited enough to finance their projects.

That undertaking is arguably tougher today than in past years, since the major studios are cutting costs and minimizing their risks because of diminishing margins.

Sheinberg decided that while he continues his efforts to get his company’s bigger-budget movies made--”a process which has not been without its aggravation and difficulty”--he would dabble in the risky business of self-financing two or three lower-cost projects.

He said he chose to risk his own money because “I don’t want anyone else to tell us who should be in our movie, who should direct the movie or how the movie should be made. And I also don’t want to be involved with other people’s money to the degree it might be lost.”

Sources say the Bubble Factory deal cost Universal more than $100 million for the settlement, the movie slate and overhead and for development expenditures. In the current issue of Fortune magazine, Bronfman says that “the quality of the movies [Sheinberg produced] was atrocious.”

Sheinberg, who has publicly blamed Universal for making questionable marketing and release- date decisions on the movies, insists that “the amount of money lost on all our pictures is less than they lost on many individual pictures. . . . I’m not unhappy with any of the movies we made. . . . I’m proud of them.”

Sheinberg said he has grown tired of “MCA bashing,” however, and is eager to talk about his latest endeavor.

“What we’re trying to do is see whether we can make some targeted pictures with rather broad audience appeal,” he explained.

“Two Goldsteins on Acid,” whose tentative title is derived from the hallucinogenic trip the parents of the young lead take after inadvertently eating LSD-laced mushrooms, is about a 23-year-old pianist whose life falls apart after graduating from the San Francisco Academy of Music.

“It’s basically a story of moving on with life,” said Sheinberg, a theme he said applies not only to Witt’s character, but also to her parents, played by Marlo Thomas and Elliott Gould, and to the piano coach, portrayed by Harvey Fierstein.

“It’s a comedy with some pathos,” said Sheinberg, who credited his son Jon with discovering the script, written by Marni Freedman and Carlos de los Rios and based on Freedman’s locally produced play.

To keep down costs, the Sheinbergs hired first-time director Matthew Huffman, who had been developing another project for their company.

“The actors are working extremely favorably for us,” said Sheinberg, including Witt, a real-life piano prodigy who most recently starred in “Urban Legend” and played the quirky daughter of Cybill Shepherd’s character on the CBS series “Cybill.”

In addition to enjoying being on the front lines creatively, Sheinberg said he’s enjoying learning about financing in independent movie making.

“There’s a very big difference between negotiating to borrow billions of dollars on behalf of MCA and negotiating to borrow 28 cents in connection with making independent pictures.”

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So far, the Sheinbergs have chosen not to pre-sell their movie for domestic or foreign distribution until after they complete production.

“I wanted to make these pictures with no responsibility for pre-sales,” Sheinberg said. “Because what happens in these kinds of cases is that all of a sudden, you find yourself being persuaded or encouraged to do certain things not because you think it’s best for the film, but because it might generate $4 more in Germany or Japan.”’

Sheinberg said that if nothing else, “Two Goldsteins” will be exactly the movie he and his sons want to make.

And, as Sheinberg says, at this point in his life and career, if he can’t do that, it’s not worth it.

“It’s not as if I’m trying to make it in show business. I believe I made it in show business. So now I want to do what I want to do.”