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When I first met Brett Ratner, he was basking in the success of having directed “Rush Hour,” the Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan action comedy that was the surprise hit of 1998. Then 29, Ratner was living large. He’d been getting congratulatory calls from Jonathan Demme and Roman Polanski. Sony was wooing him to do “Charlie’s Angels.” Warren Beatty was having him over to his house.

But despite all the attention, something was bugging the young director. The one movie Ratner wanted to make was the one no one would let him direct: “The Family Man,” the new romantic drama starring Nicolas Cage that took in an estimated $12.8 million this past weekend. At the time, it seemed like a lost cause. Cage had just dropped out of the movie, leaving the project in limbo. More importantly, producer Marc Abraham, who’d developed the project, thought Ratner was all wrong for the job.

It was one thing to make a popcorn hit, like “Rush Hour,” Abraham felt, but it was another to tackle the emotional story of a man magically given a second chance in life. It was the kind of delicate relationship movie best suited for an accomplished pro like Curtis Hanson, who’d been attached to the project, not a Sammy Glick-style schmoozer like Ratner, who likes to spend Christmas in St. Barts with his hip-hop pals Sean “Puffy” Combs and Russell Simmons.

After weeks of campaigning for the job, Ratner wrangled a meeting with Abraham at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York. It was not love at first sight.

“Brett showed up 20 minutes late with a model who was not his girlfriend and who was twice as tall as he is,” Abraham recalls. “And he was on one cell phone and another was ringing in his pocket and when he said hello to me he kept talking on the phone. And the way I was raised, I thought: This guy is a total jerk. He finally got off the phone, but it rang again and when he answered it I told him, ‘If you answer that phone again, you’ve got no chance of ever directing this movie.’

“One of his phones kept going off after that and watching Brett not answer it was like watching a drug addict at a party trying to walk by a mound of cocaine without stopping.”

Of course, this being Hollywood, Ratner got the job.

Two years later, Ratner is a bona fide player. He’s getting $5 million to direct the “Rush Hour” sequel. He has seven cars, all black, and a $5,000-a-month cell phone bill. And he lives in Allan Carr’s old Beverly Hills mansion--complete with disco ballroom--right next door to Bruce Springsteen. It also turns out that it’s easy to underestimate Ratner. Underneath his show-biz bravado, he’s a talented director. “The Family Man” is no Oscar film, but in Ratner’s hands, it has surprising warmth, emotional honesty and deft performances by Cage, Tea Leoni and Don Cheadle.

But how Ratner got the job directing the picture--and how he convinced Cage to return to the movie--is more than just the colorful tale of a bumptious young hustler. For Ratner exemplifies a modern Hollywood archetype: the fast-talking cinemagician who is “good in a room.” It’s a phrase you often hear in studio circles to illustrate the meteoric rise of a hot young director or explain why a studio put a music video smoothie at the helm of an $80-million action movie that tanked at the box office.

Talent Matters, but so Does Schmoozing

The idea that the most important job on a movie is often rewarded to someone who is good in a room reflects how some key Hollywood decisions remain the province of instinct and gut reaction. It can seem like a wacky concept; after all, if you were flying through a storm, would you want a pilot who was good in a room? Even people in the arts have demonstrable expertise: If you were performing “Aida,” you wouldn’t hire a soprano who was good in a room, would you?

Nonetheless, when you want to direct your first movie, nothing succeeds like jumping on top of a studio executive’s desk and acting out a big scene from the film. It’s what helped McG get the gig directing “Charlie’s Angels.” Movie people say it’s not as silly as it sounds.

“How you are in the room really matters,” says producer Brian Grazer. “There are so many things in making a movie that are intangibles, like tone and sensibility, that you want to feel as much as possible that the director’s vision is in sync with yours.”

When Grazer was making “Problem Child,” he wanted Dennis Dugan to direct the film. But as a first-time director, Dugan had to pass muster with then-Universal Pictures chief Casey Silver. “I told him that Casey might be bored or distracted, so you have to really perform, really go nuts,” Grazer recalls. “And after the meeting he called and said, ‘I did it! I got up on his table, I went crazy and he hired me!’ ”

In fairness, the importance of selling yourself isn’t just limited to the world of Hollywood. As Abraham puts it: “Hey, we just elected a president of the United States because he’s good in a room, didn’t we?”

As it turned out, Ratner’s biggest sales job was reviving Cage’s interest in “The Family Man,” which Ratner describes as being like “getting back together with your girlfriend a year after you’ve broken up.” Cage was worried that the movie would be too corny, that he’d end up on the poster for the film with baby diapers in his hands.

So Ratner went to work. First he came up with the idea of changing the film’s angel character from a folksy old Irishman named Sully to a young black man with a gun, eventually played by Cheadle. Then Ratner sat down with the film’s screenwriters and had them craft a customized script for Cage.

“I’d heard that Nic liked Ferraris, so I had the writers make his car in the script a Ferrari,” Ratner recalls. “I found out what kind of Italian designer suits he liked and what kind of watch he wore and had everything added to the script. It’s a trick, but it worked. I sent the new script to [Cage’s CAA agent] Richard Lovett and he called me and said, ‘It’s like night and day, it’s not generic anymore.’ ”

Ratner met with Lovett, begging him to set up a face-to-face meeting with Cage. Soon Ratner was in Cage’s trailer on the set of “Gone in 60 Seconds,” introducing himself by saying, “I’m not leaving this trailer till you say yes to this movie.” To help persuade his prey, Ratner came armed with a video of classic movie scenes. “I wanted Nic to have references to understand what the movie could be,” Ratner says. “I’d say his diaper scene on page 40 of the script, it’s not silly. Look at this scene from ‘Kramer vs. Kramer,’ where the father is making French toast for his son. And this scene on page 56, it’s going to play like this scene from ‘Terms of Endearment.’ ”

Full-Court Press to Get Nicolas Cage

Cage began to wilt in the face of this all-out assault. After the meeting, Lovett called Ratner and told him, “He likes you--you’re on the 40-yard line.” Ratner and Abraham went back for another meeting with Cage. The actor said he needed a few days to decide. A few days became 2 1/2 weeks.

Finally, just days before the film was due to begin pre-production, Cage said he was in. Lovett’s help did not go unappreciated. By the time Ratner started shooting “The Family Man,” he’d left the William Morris Agency and signed with a new agent--Lovett.

“Brett has this smooth, cherubic face,” Abraham says. “But he’s a horse-trading [SOB] who knows how to get what he wants. One moment he’s an incredibly narcissistic, spoiled brat and then, 10 seconds later, he’s the most gracious, thoughtful person in the world and it’s all genuinely him.”

The other day, during a quiet moment on the set of “Rush Hour 2,” I asked Ratner about his knack for schmoozemanship. He gives credit to his grandmother, Fanita Presman, a longtime political activist in Miami Beach, Ratner’s hometown. “She could go into any room and walk out with people loving her,” he says. “When I was a kid she took me up to Tallahassee to see the governor. The receptionist kept telling her to leave, but she wasn’t intimidated and sure enough, eventually there we were in the governor’s office, with the two of them talking like old friends. Seeing how fearless she was, I learned that you don’t have to ever take no for an answer.”

Ratner recently went to Las Vegas to woo Jerry Lewis for a key role as a villain in “Rush Hour 2.” Ratner pulled out all the stops, telling Lewis how the film would introduce him to a whole new generation of fans. He also brought his copy of Lewis’ “The Total Filmmaker” for Lewis to sign.

Lewis wasn’t easily seduced. He told Ratner, “It takes $50,000 a day just to get me out of the house.” But Ratner thinks he made progress. “When I was getting ready to leave, Jerry said to his friends, ‘This kid is unbelievable. Hearing him pitch me, it really takes me back. He’s just like me, 40 years ago.’ ”

As Ratner tells the story, his eyes are shining. A tip of the hat from one hustler to another. What could be a better compliment?

Coming Attraction: How’s this for a marketing challenge: How do you get under-40 moviegoers interested in “Thirteen Days,” New Line Cinema’s Kennedy-era drama about the Cuban missile crisis that opens nationwide on Jan. 12 after an L.A./N.Y. opening on Christmas Day? New Line marketing chief Joe Nimziki realized that he had an ace in the hole: “Lord of the Rings,” the studio’s ambitious three-picture project that will debut next Christmas. So he’s using one film to help the other. New Line will debut its first “Lord of the Rings” teaser trailer exclusively in the 2,000 theaters that are showing “Thirteen Days.”

Nimziki is betting that “Rings’ ” die-hard young fans may go see “Thirteen Days” just to see the “Rings” trailer, which he says has “a nice chunk of footage from the film with most of the characters” featured in the Peter Jackson-directed picture. “It helps us with the challenge of giving young people an extra incentive to see ‘Thirteen Days,’ ” Nimziki says. “But it also helps us create some early awareness for ‘Lord of the Rings.’ ” After a two-week exclusive run, the trailer will run in theaters with other films.

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.