The Last Swashbuckler

Dino De Laurentiis has managed to make 600 movies over the past 60 years because he has the true soul of a movie producer: When he has a problem, he dreams up a solution. Several years ago, De Laurentiis needed an action star to play the lead in a film called “Breakdown.” The actor at the top of his list was Kurt Russell. But the film had to be shot in the Utah and Arizona desert, and Russell, who lives in Pacific Palisades, had just done two pictures away from home and wanted to be with his family.

“Kurt was very polite about it, but it was clear that he wanted to stay home,” recalls “Breakdown” director Jonathan Mostow. “I was already thinking of who else we could get when Dino goes, ‘No problem. You do the movie. You sleep in your bed every night. We get you a plane.’ ”

The producer had Mostow find film locations that were near airfields with 4,200-foot runways that could accommodate small jets. Each morning a car would pick up Russell at his home, take him to Van Nuys Airport and fly him in a Learjet to airstrips near the movie’s desert locations. Then a helicopter would drop Russell next to his trailer.

“I’d get Kurt for one shot before lunch, then we’d shoot till 5 p.m. when we’d hear the helicopter coming in, like ‘MASH,’ signaling that it was time for him to go,” Mostow says. “It was crazy, but like a lot of Dino’s ideas, it worked.”

That’s Dino: Never take no for an answer. Even after most of “The Silence of the Lambs” team (Jodie Foster, director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Ted Talley) passed on “Hannibal,” the sequel to “Lambs” that opens Feb. 9, De Laurentiis kept moving full speed ahead, proclaiming: “The pope dies, you get another pope.”

With all its complicated relationships and ups and downs, “Hannibal” is in many ways a microcosm of De Laurentiis’ career. He’s been in business with “Hannibal” novelist Thomas Harris for 20 years, having bought the writer’s novel “Red Dragon” in 1981, which introduced the evil Dr. Lecter. Made in 1986 as “Manhunter,” the movie was a dud, so much so that De Laurentiis passed on the chance to make “The Silence of the Lambs.” However, when he bought “Red Dragon,” he shrewdly acquired the rights to any sequel involving Lecter.

The rights weren’t cheap--De Laurentiis paid $10 million for “Hannibal.” The project has a complicated history that isn’t easily sorted out. In simplified form: After Dino helped Harris to finish the novel--sending a chef to Miami to fortify the author with Italian food--he took the movie to Universal, which had a sequel option as part of a settlement involving a past De Laurentiis project.

When the studio felt it couldn’t bankroll the $80-million movie alone, it partnered with MGM, which is distributing the film domestically and inherited the rights to the Clarice Starling character through its purchase of Orion Pictures, the studio that made “The Silence of the Lambs.”

After Demme dropped out, De Laurentiis sent the book to Ridley Scott, who agreed to direct the film while he was shooting “Gladiator” in Malta. David Mamet wrote the first script, which wasn’t well-received, so Steve Zaillian did a major rewrite that cemented Anthony Hopkins’ commitment to return as Lecter. Julianne Moore soon emerged as a consensus choice to replace Foster.

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Having lunch with Dino and Martha, his wife and producing partner, at their palatial Beverly Hills home one day, I got a taste of his producerial powers of persuasion. When I politely declined a second helping of spaghetti carbonara, Dino waved off my objections and personally heaped another mound of pasta on my plate. By the time lunch was over, we’d had veal chops, a Christmas antipasto, dried figs flown in from Italy and a Neapolitan dessert called strufoli that may well have more calories in one serving than what Calista Flockhart consumes in a month.

With Dino De Laurentiis, everything is bigger than life, whether it’s food, movies or his hilltop mansion, which was built by Joseph Kennedy in the 1920s for his mistress, Gloria Swanson. When an especially distinguished Santa Claus arrived to distribute presents at Dino and Martha’s Christmas party, their two young daughters saw through Santa’s disguise right away: It was “Hannibal” star Sir Anthony Hopkins, an old family friend.

At 81, De Laurentiis remains a master showman, the last survivor of a bygone era of swashbuckling Hollywood producers such as Joseph E. Levine and Sam Spiegel who made movies fueled by grandiose schemes and consummate salesmanship. When he made “Hurricane” in Bora Bora in the late ‘70s, it wasn’t enough to shoot a movie on a remote island; he bought a freighter to ferry all the equipment to the island and then built a hotel to house his cast, crew and an army of extras. In the 1960s, impatient with traditional movie financing, he invented the system of financing films by selling off foreign territories that most studios live by today.

Having survived a career of dizzying highs and calamitous lows that would have ruined a less resilient man, De Laurentiis is still full of earthy energy. Fortified with espresso, a cigarillo and an armful of pink Italian newspapers chronicling the fortunes of his favorite soccer team, the producer conducts an interview like a maestro, telling anecdotes in a colorful English all his own, cursing in two languages and occasionally banging his fist on a table to get an important point across.

Seen by friends as a grandfatherly lion in winter, by enemies as a crafty hustler, Dino has always lived by his wiles. “I never met a studio executive when I did films with Dino,” says screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, who worked on a string of Dino projects, including “Three Days of the Condor” and “Hurricane.”

“There was no development process. It was just Dino and it was fun. He’d call and say, ‘What do you think about doing ‘King Kong’? And I’d say, ‘Sounds good.’ And he’d say, ‘Great, let’s make it!’ ”

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De Laurentiis made his name as a producer in postwar Italy, churning out dozens of potboilers. He discovered Silvana Mangano, the first of many Gina Lollobrigida-style Italian sex goddesses, who was to become De Laurentiis’ first wife. He also made prestige films with Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini, financing “La Strada” and “Nights of Cabiria.”

But Dino’s style remained the same, no matter the project. When Fellini refused to cut a sluggish 10-minute segment of “Cabiria,” De Laurentiis simply stole the offending segment from the editing room. When Fellini asked what happened to the scene, Dino shrugged and said: “I have no idea. I guess it a bit of luck--it make the story shorter.”

In the 1960s, De Laurentiis built his own studio, Dino Citta, making everything from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot Le Fou” to Roger Vadim’s “Barbarella.” Dino has always valued good scripts, saying they are the true stars of a movie; when he started his ill-fated De Laurentiis Group in the 1980s, his first production chief was screenwriter Gary Devore.

But De Laurentiis had a keener eye for commercial projects than critical gems. He financed “Blue Velvet,” but only after David Lynch had made the film Dino really wanted: “Dune,” a mega-flop. When Lynch pitched De Laurentiis his next film, the producer told him: “Inside that head of yours is a $100-million movie. I just hope I’m not broke before it comes out.”

In the early 1970s, after new Italian laws restricted the use of international crews, De Laurentiis moved to America and started over. He made great thrillers, including “Serpico” and “Three Days of the Condor,” kitschy hits like “King Kong” and art-house fare like Ingmar Bergman’s “The Serpent’s Egg.” In 1985 he gave up his one-man show and launched the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group.

By 1988, the company was bankrupt, sunk by a series of epic flops that included “Dune,” “King Kong Lives” and “Orca,” a killer whale movie that De Laurentiis sold with the pitch: “We make ‘Jaws,’ except this time the shark is the hero.” Covering his costs by pre-selling foreign distribution and home video rights, and making his films at a low-budget studio in nonunion North Carolina, De Laurentiis supposedly had a foolproof hit machine. But he ran the company like a family business, hiring his daughter, Raffaella, as head of production, and making various deals with other relatives. The $200 million he raised through junk bonds and bank loans eventually all went down the drain.

“We’d talk every Monday morning after another movie had come out and when I’d say, ‘Dino, we didn’t do so well,’ he’d always say, ‘OK, it didn’t work, what’s next?’ ” recalls MGM distribution chief Larry Gleason, who was DEG’s head of marketing and distribution. “He was an eternal optimist. The next director was always going to be Steven Spielberg.”

De Laurentiis admits he was ill-prepared to oversee a corporate enterprise. “I had no familiarity with American public companies and I had the wrong people around me,” he says. “They convinced me to make some bad movies and not to make some good ones. But you know what? Life goes on. You learn to get past your problems and start again.”

De Laurentiis’ colleagues say he was also hampered by his poor English--he still has scripts translated into Italian. Apparently the translations weren’t always U.N. quality. Lorenzo Semple recalls the time Dino’s translator visited his home to pick up a script. “She saw one of our cats and said, ‘My, what a beautiful dog you have.’ My wife said, ‘If this is the person translating Dino’s scripts, he’s really in trouble.’ ”

De Laurentiis is betting “Hannibal” will be a career capper. If the film is a hit, everyone will get a payday: Roughly 30% of the back-end profits go to Dino, Harris, Hopkins and Scott. Dino can’t wait for opening weekend, when MGM will have 5,000 prints in theaters nationwide. In a meeting at MGM last month, the studio’s top executives walked De Laurentiis through the marketing campaign, showing him a set of new 30-second TV spots.

De Laurentiis seems satisfied, but he has a suggestion. “Why don’t you end some spots with [Hopkins’] line, ‘I’ve been giving serious thought to eating your wife.’ The audience loves that.” Everyone nods in agreement.

“The key is Hannibal Lecter,” Dino explains. “He’s as big a star as Tom Cruise. And you know why? Audiences love him because he kills lots of people.”

After 60 years, his instincts are as canny as ever. He knows audiences want something bigger than life, whether it’s a murderous villain or a horrific hurricane. “Making movies is all about instinct,” he says one day. “Nobody taught Picasso how to paint--he learned for himself. And nobody can teach you to be a producer. You can learn the mechanics, but you can’t learn what’s right about a script or a director or an actor. That comes from instinct and intuition. It comes from inside you.”

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