Forget Bad Boy, De Luca Says: Look at Work

Michael De Luca, 33-year-old movie chief at New Line Cinema, calls himself a “cinema geek,” but he is widely regarded as one of Hollywood’s hippest and brightest young professionals.

His sometimes wild personal antics have also made him one of its most colorful.

Known for his pop-culture tastes and gutsy creative instincts for edgy, controversial movies, De Luca has picked such audience pleasers in recent years as Jim Carrey’s “The Mask” and “Dumb and Dumber,” “Austin Powers,” “Boogie Nights,” “Wag the Dog,” “Menace II Society,” “Seven” and “Mortal Kombat.”

Under his direction, New Line scored its most successful box-office year ever in 1998 with such unexpected hits as “The Wedding Singer” and “Rush Hour.”

De Luca, a native of Brooklyn, New York, is unusual in that he has worked at New Line his entire professional career--joining the then-boutique company as an 18-year-old intern while attending New York University’s film school. He eventually dropped out of NYU just four credits shy of graduating.

De Luca’s rebelliousness against movie conventions and creative risk-taking have served him well with stars and filmmakers and have helped distinguish New Line as an attractive alternative studio.

Critics say his unconventional behavior outside the office--reckless incidents involving drunk driving, slugging a restaurant patron and flaunting his sexuality at a high-profile Oscar party last year--has gone too far, earning him a reputation as Hollywood’s “bad boy.”

It’s an image De Luca is ready to shed.

“I don’t want to be that guy,” he said. “I want to be who I think I am.”

He’d like to be regarded for his accomplishments in helping to shepherd New Line from a small independent to a major competitive force in Hollywood. Much of that growth has occurred in the last five years, since the company was bought by billionaire Ted Turner and subsequently merged with media giant Time Warner.

De Luca, wearing his usual work attire of blue jeans and black motorcycle boots, was interviewed recently in his New Line office in Los Angeles.

Question: You’ve had a terrific year, even better than your sister studio, Warner Bros.

Answer: It just goes to show how cyclical the business is. . . . I wish there was an encounter group for studio heads who have bad years, because everyone has them.

Q: How supportive was Turner when New Line went through a bad streak in 1996?

A: He was very supportive. He didn’t overreact to the failures.

Q: What has it meant to New Line to be owned by a big media company like Time Warner?

A: The only change that really effected us was when Turner acquired the company. The Time Warner merger with Turner never really trickled down to us.

Q: What changed after Turner bought the company?

A: Before Turner, we had a budget cap of $15 million. When Turner came in, it allowed us to go after more expensive movies. That was a big, huge change.

Q: And it got you in big, huge trouble a few years ago with “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” “Last Man Standing” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau”--all of which bombed.

A: I keep thinking about this line from “Star Wars” about that year: “It was a dark time for the rebellion.” Everything was going wrong that year. But I think we learned a lot. We rushed into the bigger-budget movies. If we found those opportunities again, we’d be more cautious.

Q: Wasn’t that your attempt to play in the big leagues?

A: It began in 1993 with the rewriting of the business plan, which was supposed to be two-thirds traditional New Line fare [under $15 million], but also stepping into the mid-range pictures--$15 million to $35 million that most majors decry these days--and making two or three over-$50-million event movies. I think we went about the big-budget movies quickly and without the right analysis.

Q: You’re now back to making movies for less than the industry average, though you still go for the occasional big-budget films like the $90-million “Lost in Space” and Warren Beatty’s upcoming “Town and Country.”

A: That movie was green-lit at $44 million and is now $68 million, because we basically doubled the shooting schedule. . . . We try to be as analytical as we can on each picture, whether it cost $1 million or $90 million, with this weird kind of alliance between business and art.

Q: How do you handle the inherent conflict between art and commerce?

A: I wouldn’t call it conflict. It’s a practical consideration to think that the art is married to the business, because the investment to create the art is so high. People in my job have to manage the line between the filmmaker’s vision and the return on investment you promised your company. And you try to make sure those things don’t run counter to each other. It’s a doable job, but it requires a lot of line-walking. It was even worse before Turner, because we really lived and died by every movie. Now we have a little more room to be patrons occasionally, if we know we have a “Rush Hour” or “Wedding Singer.”

Q: New Line often takes risks on movies other studios would reject.

A: It comes from being outsiders. Because we always had limitations on what we could spend and didn’t have access to the top five producers and top five movie stars, necessity demanded that we pick projects that by definition are sleepers. So I attribute it to the training I received and to the work ethic I learned from [my bosses] Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne.

Q: Do you need big movie stars to guarantee hits?

A: I would kill for “You’ve Got Mail.” I’d kill for a great big star movie, because I really enjoy seeing those. We just don’t get a lot of them because of the road we travel.

Q: Now you can afford a Tom Cruise or Meg Ryan.

A: The practical problem is these people probably get 20 scripts and 20 offers a day, so you don’t want to have to wait, to have a script sit at the bottom of a pile and work its way up for three months. The great, rewarding thing about breaking new talent is you don’t have to wait in line.

Q: Do you think Hollywood studios in general are afraid to take creative risks?

A: I think they’ve been slower to do it because the overhead of these companies is so huge you want to cover your bets with things that look like they’re going to be guaranteed returns, and those things are always riddled with formula. So that probably doesn’t allow you to take risks on smaller movies and feel secure about breaking talent, which has left an opening for companies like mine and Miramax.

Q: Who out there besides New Line and Miramax is giving audiences something fresh and unique?

A: I think Fox, with its different divisions, is the closest thing to doing that while still managing the big-picture business.

Q: Your personal tastes run toward more edgy, offbeat stories, right?

A: I have developed an internal filter for myself, where I can’t really get excited about things that seem derivative or formulaic. I have to watch it sometimes, because my tastes can run too dark or too quirky.

Q: How much autonomy do you have picking the movies you want to make?

A: Once the development budget for the year is approved, I have autonomy about the things we develop. When it comes time for green-lighting a movie, I’m more of an advocate. Bob and Michael green-light the movies.

Q: Have they ever denied you a movie you wanted to make?

A: It hasn’t happened a lot. When I’ve jumped up and down, they’ve made the movie. Sometimes I wish they would have stopped me.

Q: Like when?

A: On “Dr. Moreau.” I just wish they would have shot me in the head.

Q: Over the last 15 years you’ve been at New Line, the company has grown from a small, scrappy independent to a company that goes head to head with the studios. Do you consider New Line a major or an independent?

A: When we were reclassified as a major by the MPAA in 1993, I thought we could be the maverick major and try to do what Fox [TV] did when it debuted with the other established networks. I thought we could be the alternative studio. And that’s how I still think of us.

Q: What is your strategy now?

A: It really breaks down to operating in three categories: the niche pictures, the $3-million-to-$15-million range; the mid-range pictures costing $15 million to $35 million; and one to three of the big ones.

Q: What about that middle range, which some of the majors regard as box-office suicide?

A: It really terrifies me when they say that, because we really live in that mid-range. It’s funny to have your bread and butter described as deadly. You hope it never comes true. It’s a wonderful range to be in, because you get movies like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “Wag the Dog”--movies that don’t cost so much that they’re going to break the bank if they don’t work and, if they do work, there’s real upside.

Q: How corporate is New Line under Time Warner? Have you ever worn a tie to work?

A: I have suits and, I’m really not trying to be cute, but I’ve worn them because I didn’t have anything else clean. Then when you wear a suit and you don’t normally wear them, people react to it in a nice way, so you get all geared up wearing one.

Q: There are those who say you really enjoy your reputation as Hollywood’s “bad boy.” Is that true?

A: No. It’s a complicated issue for me. . . . I enjoy attention, and sometimes my ability to distinguish the right kind of attention has not been as good as I would like it to be. In some cases, I enjoy being talked about, and a lot of times it was because of the job I was doing. But a lot of times I’ve regretted what I thought were parts of my reputation that I caused but that didn’t reflect my personality. I never thought of myself as the kind of idiot that would do some of the things that I’ve done.

Q: You mean like slugging somebody in a restaurant or engaging in a sex act in front of guests at an Oscar party?

A: You feel the worst parts of your nature got the better of you in those situations. That party was a tremendous wake-up call, because I thought it really showed a remarkable lack of judgment. Seeing that incident mentioned next to my name all year really made me feel like “I don’t want to be that guy. I want to be who I think I am.”

Q: And who exactly is that?

A: I love my job and feel lucky that I still have it. I want to be that guy and not go through some latent adolescence in front of all Hollywood. I’d rather be better than that.