End of an Era at New Line, Beginning of One for De Luca

Oh, the irony: When I drove up to Michael De Luca’s house high in the Hollywood Hills the other day, a motorcycle cop was in his driveway, directing traffic past a scrum of equipment trucks and a honey wagon--someone was making a movie next door.

After spending his entire 16-year movie-business career at New Line Cinema, it’s De Luca who’s now just a spectator. Two years ago the gifted college dropout was Variety’s showman of the year and the hottest suit in Hollywood, even though he usually came to work in a T-shirt, jeans and a backward baseball cap. Today he’s out of a job, having been fired earlier this month as president of New Line Cinema after a string of his movies fizzled at the box office.

He won’t go begging. Having made a host of hits, including “Austin Powers,” “Seven” and “Rush Hour,” and critical favorites like “Boogie Nights,” the 35-year-old De Luca has many industry fans. Although he’s already talked with a few suitors, he’s in no rush to take a new job, especially since he can exercise a lucrative New Line production deal that could fund $100 million in films of his choice over a three-year period. In his first interview since his dismissal, he tried to put some perspective on his meteoric career.

“I haven’t been out of a job since I was 15. Since then all I’ve done is work at a bagel store and at New Line,” he says, sitting in a kitchen whose refrigerator is empty except for bottled water and power bars. “Leaving New Line is probably the last act of my adolescence. Now I get to be a grown-up.”

On the counter is a bouquet from Courtney Love that is signed: “You rock, C Love.” “For days I thought, ‘Who is Clove and why is she sending me flowers?’ ” he admits.

Always boyish-looking, De Luca now has streaks of gray in his close-cropped hair. “I’m looking way too much like George Peppard,” he says. “I guess stress really can give you gray hair.”

What makes De Luca’s sudden exit even more stinging is that he was let go by the same man who gave him his first movie job when he was a 19-year-old NYU film student looking for a summer internship. At New Line, perhaps the last studio to be run like a family business even though it has been owned since the mid-1990s by what would become AOL Time Warner, De Luca was known as studio founder Robert Shaye’s No. 1 son.

And their relationship, spirited at best, stormy at worst, was at the heart of De Luca’s rise to stardom and his fall from grace. It came as no surprise to New Liners that the studio’s music chief, Toby Emmerich, known as Shaye’s No. 2 son, was named as De Luca’s successor.

In a scene that would only happen at New Line, the night De Luca was fired, he took Emmerich out for a beer at Chaya Brasserie, an eatery next door to New Line, to wish him luck and brief him on various studio projects. He also sent an e-mail to the staff praising their spirit and teamwork, saying, “No matter the trouble I managed to get us into, you have all labored tirelessly, sometimes without enough credit, to see that things came out right.”

De Luca’s departure, coming a week before a big AOL Time Warner downsizing in which 100 New Line staffers were let go, marks the end of an era at the freewheeling studio. While Emmerich has expertise that extends beyond his close ties with Shaye--he wrote “Frequency,” one of the studio’s few hits last year--his charismatic predecessor will be a tough act to follow.

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Brash and outspoken, De Luca often acted more like a rock star than a studio boss. He rode a Harley to the office; impulsively married one of his production executives; got into a drunken brawl at a restaurant with a reporter in tow; and, most famously, caused a tabloid frenzy after having oral sex with a woman at an exclusive Hollywood Oscar party three years ago. De Luca, who has cleaned up his act considerably since that incident, calls it “my biggest regret. It’ll be written next to my name for the rest of my life, like Clinton’s impeachment.”

De Luca’s personal behavior often overshadowed his savvy movie-making instincts. Until Shaye made him production chief in 1993, New Line was the last stop on any filmmaker’s list; it was essentially a low-budget assembly line for series like “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” classed up by an occasional John Waters or Robert Altman film.

De Luca transformed the company by tapping into a rich gumbo of youth-culture trends. He embraced outrageous comedy long before the major studios figured it out, making two of Jim Carrey’s first hits (“The Mask” and “Dumb and Dumber”) and championing Mike Myers’ “Austin Powers” when the comic was at a career nadir. When Adam Sandler couldn’t get movies made at Universal, De Luca rescued him, greenlighting “The Wedding Singer,” his breakthrough hit.

Paul Thomas Anderson couldn’t get arrested with a 2 1/2-hour script set in the ‘70s porn world; De Luca read “Boogie Nights” and fought to get it made. He also made New Line the first studio to consistently back young black filmmakers, scoring hits with “Menace II Society,” “Set It Off” and the “Friday” series. Before he became a $20-million star, Chris Tucker had starring roles in three movies, all New Line films.

“We took a lot of risks because we came from a low-budget world where we were used to hiring people who hadn’t established themselves,” De Luca explains. “It created a mind-set where you looked for talent that was about to break and for material that didn’t need a big movie star.”

But in recent years, De Luca’s surrogate father-son relationship with Shaye began to fray. Having kept the studio afloat early on with inexpensive thrillers and horror movies, Shaye was more comfortable with genre fare that looked good when run through the studio’s profit-and-loss projection sheets. De Luca preferred betting on quality material that would attract top talent. De Luca’s mantra was: Stars follow directors who follow material.

De Luca, who could only greenlight pictures with Shaye’s approval, chafed at his boss’ reluctance to gamble on cutting-edge talent: New Line put “Being John Malkovich” and “Rushmore” into turnaround after they didn’t pass muster with the studio’s profit-and-loss projections, only to see them become highly regarded elsewhere. De Luca also grew impatient with Shaye’s brusque handling of prized talent. Anderson, for example, never forgave Shaye for trying to re-cut “Boogie Nights” when it didn’t score well with test audiences.

Shaye says he assembled a new version of the film on an Avid machine and “let Paul see a version that I thought might be more successful. It’s a little arrogant for a filmmaker not to want to hear someone else’s ideas. It was collaborating with a filmmaker as opposed to patronization.”

Shaye stressed the importance of profit projections, but argued that he approved every film De Luca wanted to make “with five or six exceptions.” “Ultimately my responsibility is to our shareholders, not to Mike’s personal passions,” he said. “ ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Rushmore’ were wonderful films, but they weren’t big moneymakers. My feeling is I’d pay $9 to see a great film, but I wouldn’t necessarily pay $19 million to make it.”

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De Luca made his share of mistakes too. He gambled on too many unproven directors and put too many films into production with script flaws. His biggest blunder was “Town and Country.” A comedy starring Warren Beatty, the troubled project began filming in June 1998 and still hasn’t been seen by anyone outside the studio. The film was greenlit by De Luca at $45 million but ended up costing about $85 million. The studio announced Monday that it has pushed back its release date again; it now opens April 20.

“It totally got away from me,” De Luca admits. “The big mistake was starting without a finished script. It’s the oldest and dumbest mistake in the business, and I did it.” Believing the story could be sold as a “ ‘First Wives’ Club’-style” comedy, De Luca recruited Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn as Beatty’s co-stars. To accommodate the actresses’ schedules, the movie went into production, with Buck Henry on set to help finish the script as shooting continued. When the actresses left, the studio had to wait a year until they were available to finish shooting key scenes.

By the end of 2000, New Line was in a prolonged slump. Although the losses generated by the failure of Sandler’s “Little Nicky” attracted the most public attention, it was viewed more as a bad break--after two straight $160-million hits, any studio executive would’ve made an Adam Sandler movie.

But as the drought wore on, De Luca and Shaye’s relationship deteriorated. By year’s end, the two men were barely speaking. At New Line’s Christmas party, De Luca was conspicuous in his absence.

“I’m sure the company’s performance made Bob lose confidence in my ability to do the job,” says De Luca. “We differed on two major points. First, everyone has flops. It’s how many hits you have that counts. And I was proud that we were always a sleeper factory. We had hits without stars or the best material.

“Secondly, Bob believes that our personal tastes should take a back seat to what our customers want, and I could never do that. I had to make decisions based on my own gut feelings.”

As Shaye bluntly put it: “We’re running a business, not a film school, and there’s just so much tolerance that you can have for an organization that’s not making money.”

De Luca says he harbors no bitterness toward Shaye. “At New Line, you never had to deal with politics or manipulation because the company was basically one guy, Bob Shaye. And when he was on your side, it was glorious. I was at a premiere one night when Jim Carrey needed an instant answer to whether we’d pay him $7 million to do ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ and I asked Bob right in the middle of the party and he said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”

Many in Hollywood believe New Line will be a less adventuresome and more bottom-line place with De Luca gone. If De Luca thinks so, he isn’t letting on. “It’s still Bob’s company,” he says. “And he still has a true pride of authorship in the movies they make, whether it’s me or Toby in the job. I look at it as when they changed Darrins on ‘Bewitched.’ The show kept going. They just had a different actor with a different interpretation of the part.”

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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.