A Warrior Gets His Due

His last action-packed blockbuster (“The Matrix”) just won four Academy Awards, and two sequels are on the fast track. His current release (the modestly budgeted “Romeo Must Die”) has already taken in more than twice what it cost to make, and its soundtrack was No. 5 last week.

And as if that weren’t enough, producer Joel Silver confided giddily over lunch the other day, “Wait until you see what we’re doing with Steven Seagal.”

“The movie opens in an anger management class,” Silver said of “Exit Wounds,” due to start shooting in July. The film will seek to resuscitate Seagal’s flagging career as a leading he-man.

Digging into a salad at the Warner Bros. commissary, Silver sketched the film’s first scene: An anger counselor prods Seagal, a cop, to open up and share; Seagal explodes, busts up some furniture, then exits to find his car being stolen. Seagal lays waste to the carjackers as his classmates and fellow rage addicts cheer him wildly on.

“I think it’s Seagal the way the audience wants to see him. But it’s also fun and plays with what’s happened to him,” Silver said. “Seagal is very anxious to get back [into movies]. He’s lost weight. He looks good. He will not have a ponytail.”

If anyone can take an aging martial arts star and reinvent him, it’s Silver. For nearly two decades, he has helped shape the modern action genre (then retool it for the cyber age), turning some of Hollywood’s biggest stars into commando soldiers, buddy cops and, ultimately, very lucrative franchises. Like any true survivor, Silver has weathered his share of big flops (think 1991’s “Hudson Hawk”).

But mostly, his credits read like a must-see list for anyone who counts relentless action flicks among life’s guilty pleasures: “48 HRS.” with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, “Commando” and both “Predator” movies with Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Demolition Man” with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes, all four “Lethal Weapon” romps with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover and the first two “Die Hard” flicks with Bruce Willis.

These movies, among many others, have made Silver rich. Having once quipped that “I’m not in this business to make art, I’m in it to make money to buy art,” he is an avid collector, owning two homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, and one of Richard Serra’s 20-ton steel sculptures.

Now, with “The Matrix’s” Oscars for best editing, best sound effects editing, best visual effects and best sound, Silver finds himself enjoying something else he admits he craved: respect.

“There’s always been a feeling that if a movie made a lot of money, it had to be bad. We’ve always lived with that on the pictures that we do, which is why I never thought anything we did would be an Academy Award-winning anything. So it’s pretty exciting to win four,” he said of the film, the high-tech brainstorm of filmmakers Larry and Andy Wachowski.

“Forever, it will be listed as the Academy Award-winning ‘The Matrix.’ It bumps up the lineage; the legacy of the picture has a little more of a gilded edge.”

It may gall his critics--and there are many--but there’s no getting around it: This is a good time to be Joel Silver. Newly married (to former assistant and producer Karyn Fields), the 47-year-old famous screamer seems almost mellow these days. He and his wife are building a big new house in Brentwood. Even wearing his trademark loose-fitting clothing, he is noticeably slimmer (he’s lost 25 pounds on the Zone). And the bungalow that houses Silver Pictures on the Warner Bros. lot is buzzing with activity.

“Joel’s on 3!” a receptionist yells from the lobby, where a 7-foot model of the Predator and a vintage anti-tank gun share space with a riot of other movie props and posters. It’s just before lunchtime, and Silver--running late--is not in the office. But he calls in every minute and a half.

His Style Has Been Anything but Laid-Back

There are many well-known stories about Silver on the telephone, barking at assistants, calling people morons and yelling, always yelling.

For years, the legend of Silver--once dubbed the Selznick of Schlock by Premiere magazine--was so vivid in Hollywood that whenever a movie mogul appeared in a film, the actor seemed to be aping Silver. Director Robert Zemeckis cast Silver in 1988’s “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” as a bombastic film director; Steve Martin played a Silver-like producer in 1991’s “Grand Canyon”; and Saul Rubinek was a caricature of Silver in 1993’s “True Romance.”

But on this day, Silver’s volume is moderate. His workday, by contrast, appears to be frenetic, as are many of his movies.

He’s got a TV pilot, “Freedom,” in production for UPN about life in America during a military coup. In June, he’s got two pictures due to begin shooting: “13 Ghosts,” the second horror film (“House on Haunted Hill” was the first) from his and Zemeckis’ joint venture, Dark Castle Entertainment, and “Proximity,” a $5-million thriller starring Rob Lowe that is the first effort of Silver’s new low-budget Zinc Pictures division. A month later, in July, cameras are due to roll on the Seagal picture.

Inspired by the popularity of the Trinity character (played by Carrie-Anne Moss) in “The Matrix,” Silver is also working on what could be his first action picture with a female lead.

He’s asked Warner Bros. for one of its legendary properties, the DC Comics-inspired “Wonder Woman,” and is developing it with hopes of making it with Sandra Bullock. In March 2001, the two “Matrix” sequels begin simultaneous production.

For all its box-office success ($456 million in worldwide ticket sales) and eventual academy recognition, “The Matrix”--which pitted sleek, trench coat-wearing Keanu Reeves against computers who rule the world--still suffered negative fallout when two trench coat-wearing teens opened fire in a Colorado high school last year, killing 12 classmates and a teacher.

Silver laid low, declining to be quoted in the many articles about Hollywood and violence published at the time. A year after the Columbine shootings, however, he’s philosophical, if just a tad defensive.

“Look, children killing children is probably the single worst thing known to man. And to have that happen and to have someone mention something we’ve done in even the same sentence is horrific,” he said, adding: “But there have been a lot of trench coats in a lot of movies. Believe me, we didn’t write the book on trench coats.”

‘We’re Just Trying to Make Money’

Along with many others in Hollywood, Silver believes it is simplistic scapegoating to blame movies for society’s ills.

“Blaming Hollywood is like taking a high-powered rifle out to a field and shooting a cow,” he said, choosing an unusually gory metaphor. “The cow is just standing there--Mooo!--and Bam! I mean, we’re just trying to make money, trying to get people to see our product by giving them a good time, and they take that high-powered rifle and say, ‘It’s your fault’ and just shoot us.”

(Gun imagery is, apparently, a staple in conversation with Silver. Listen to him describe his close friend Terry Semel, for example, who stepped down as co-chairman of Warner Bros. last year: “I could kill him for moving on, but he had to do what he had to do, and I’d still take a bullet for him.”)

Silver laments that the news media--particularly television--”adds to the cheapness of life” by showing dead bodies on the evening news. He says his movies, by contrast, give people a fun ride, incorporating violence in a stylized, over-the-top fashion that the audience knows is not real.

For example, in “Romeo Must Die” the demise of a female villain is shown, surrealistically, from a perspective inside her body, as a stake goes through her heart.

“Look, it’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s more fun,” Silver said of the technique, which is also used to show the collapse of another evildoer’s spine. “Now, if I say it’s fun to put a stake through a heart, it’s not going to sound very good, no matter how you write it. I don’t ever want to say that violence is fun. These are action movies, and action is fun.

“But when audiences saw the collapse of the spinal column, they went crazy. They loved it. They cheered,” he continued. “Were they cheering the collapse of a guy’s spinal column? No. They were cheering that the bad guy died in an interesting, cool way and you could see it.”

Silver tries to make movies that remind him of the “high-octane, explosive action genre” movies he grew up watching in Maplewood, N.J.: “The Guns of Navarone,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Dirty Dozen,” among others.

He’s knowledgeable about cinematic history (he admits, for example, that a scene in “Romeo Must Die” was borrowed from the 1949 James Cagney movie “White Heat”). He’s opinionated about what makes action movies work, having long ago invented what he calls the Whammo Chart (which dictates one big action beat every 10 minutes). And he insists that the action genre--though still formulaic--has evolved.

The 1985 “Commando,” for example, helped define Schwarzenegger’s tough-but-ironic sensibility, and Silver still can recite favorite lines of dialogue: “There’s a scene where Arnold has this guy hanging over a cliff and says, ‘Remember I told you I’d kill you last? I lied.’ And he drops him.” But overall, the movie “seems so amateurish to me now. The plotting seems so simplistic. The characters seem so silly. It seems clunky and old-fashioned.”

In “The Matrix,” by contrast, the Wachowskis--whom Silver fondly calls “the boys”--”created the story so it was like peeling away the layers of an onion. You don’t see the story in the normal A-to-B-to-C. You see it almost backward. You’re almost in the matrix,” Silver said.

“The audience, you have to twist them. You let them think they’re ahead of you, but you’re ahead of them. When you do that, you’ve got ‘em.”

Silver tried once before to make two sequels at once with “Lethal Weapon” but couldn’t pull it off. He says that’s because he lacked good scripts. But thanks to the vision of the Wachowski brothers, Silver had no such problem with “The Matrix” franchise. In effect, he said, the Wachowskis conceived the first film as a prequel, with the real story to come.

The sequels, Silver said, will be shot as one long movie and cut in half. “The Matrix 2” is aiming for theaters around Christmas 2002, with the third installment coming six months later. In addition to the full-length movies, there will be a series of six-minute animated short films (probably to be distributed on the Internet) that will explain how we get from today to the point when the original “Matrix” begins.

“The boys are big fans of serial fiction because they’re from comic books. All along, they wanted to do a superhero-type story in a world that it would be believable that people could have superpowers,” Silver said.

“It took them a movie--a full movie--to set up the characters the way they wanted to for their story. If ‘The Matrix’ hadn’t worked out, that would’ve been all we would have seen, and thank you very much.”