Hollywood and the Hereafter: Earthly Gains Aplenty

Roger Richman doesn’t look or act like a prophet, much less a medium who traffics with those on the other side of the Great Divide. He’s a portly 57-year-old lawyer whose garrulousness would disrupt any self-respecting seance.

A couple of decades ago, however, Richman had the bright idea that the earning potential of movie stars and historical figures needn’t end merely because those peoples’ lives did, and that it could, in fact, be managed and enhanced just like that of celebrities still striding the earth.

So, Richman founded an agency dedicated to nurturing the careers of the dead. The seven-person Beverly Hills-based Roger Richman Agency, the oldest of a handful doing such work, occupies offices opposite Creative Artists Agency on Wilshire Boulevard, “right across from the live agents,” as Richman and his people like to say. The suits at CAA might well look across the road with envy. Richman commissions the deceased at an otherworldly 35% (the traditional fee for representing those still drawing breath is 10%).

There are other benefits to the work, too. John Wayne, Audrey Hepburn, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud--all perpetually in demand by advertisers, and all Richman clients--are already enshrined in the public heart. What’s more, unlike living celebrities, they’re not going to get drunk and trash a nightclub or be busted for drug possession, thereby giving their agent peptic ulcers. “I don’t have people calling me in the middle of the night saying there aren’t enough red M&Ms; in the Green Room,” is how Richman sums it up.

The beneficiaries of Richman’s work, besides himself, are the heirs of the deceased or, in many cases, the nonprofit organizations that receive posthumous proceeds. Einstein’s continuing income, for example, flows to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Richman labors on behalf of 48 clients, none of whom he has personally known in this plane of existence (although he keeps in his office a snapshot of himself as a toddler in the arms of Einstein, an associate of his late father, Paul, director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith).

This lack of intimate familiarity with his clients, however, doesn’t prevent Richman from divining what their wishes are. Peddling their images and signatures and trademark behaviors to the likes of Apple computers, Ford Motor Co. and Coors beer, “we like to think we’re acting in their place and doing things commercially that they would have done or would have liked to do,” he says. “We resurrect them for a new audience. We bring them back into the limelight, where they’d probably like to be.”

One of Richman’s most productive clients is Einstein, a major contributor to the agency’s seven-figure annual revenue. A significant portion of the agency’s work is policing trademark infringement, and the 14 law firms it retains have no fewer than 116 such matters pending in regard to Einstein alone.

Another A-list client is Steve McQueen, “whom we are positioning as the king of cool” to a generation that came of age since the actor’s death from cancer two decades ago. Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer has produced a watch, about the thickness of a small lamb chop, that is a copy of the one it made for McQueen to wear in the film “Le Mans.” Ford Motor Co. quickly sold all of its 5,000 special edition “Bullitt” Mustangs tricked out with the same foot pedals and instrument clusters as the one in which the actor bounced over the hills of San Francisco in the famous nine-minute chase sequence of the 1968 cop movie. Some of Richman’s most ambitious plans are for clients Orville and Wilbur Wright. The centennial of the brothers’ pioneering flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., is coming up in 2003, and the agent is maneuvering the Wrights into position for the biggest payday of their afterlives (proceeds will go to the Wright Brothers Family Fund, which makes grants to a broad range of charities). Richman hopes to line up 16 corporations to pay between $2.5 million and $4 million apiece for the right to invoke the brothers commercially for 18 months coinciding with the anniversary celebrations of their flight by such public agencies as NASA, the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Mint.

The irony of this is almost too rich to digest. For ages, religions all over the world have dreamed up countless notions of an afterlife, but it is Hollywood, that most heathen of institutions, that has established a direct pipeline and, characteristically, figured out how to suck earthly gain through it. Before long it’ll be sending Adam Sandler movies the other way.

Could it be that God, renowned for mysterious ways, has a soft spot in his heart for his oft-scorned children who run the entertainment business? Lord, you’d think the expense accounts would be reward enough.