New Line earns as exec learns

In recent weeks, the industry gossip mills have been buzzing about a near brawl between director Brett Ratner and co-star Woody Harrelson on the set of the upcoming caper flick “After the Sunset.” So when Toby Emmerich’s assistant said Harrelson was calling from the Bahamas, where the film is shooting, the New Line production chief warily picked up the phone.

Harrelson had recently gotten into a shouting match with the director, ripped off his shirt, dived into the water and swum to the director’s nearby camera boat to pursue the argument. This time, the news seemed even worse than expected. “Man, things are really getting bad,” Harrelson told Emmerich. “I really can’t take it anymore -- I’m gonna have to go home.” Emmerich started to panic, calculating how long it would take to fly to the Bahamas for an intervention. Then Harrelson started to laugh. “Come on, man,” he cackled. “I’m just [messing] with you.”

Crisis averted -- for now. By the time he’s off the phone, Emmerich looks relieved: “If Woody can joke about it, he and Brett must be getting along again.”

Emmerich is entitled to be optimistic. His studio is on a roll. Since August, New Line has had a run of hugely profitable films. “Elf,” the studio’s holiday comedy hit, cost $32 million and is on track to make $175 million. The studio paid $7 million for domestic rights to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” a remake of the 1974 horror hit that has grossed $80 million. And Emmerich pushed hard to make the long-delayed “Freddy vs. Jason,” a $30-million slasher film that also made $80 million.

The biggest hit is probably yet to come, with the much-anticipated final installment of the studio’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “The Return of the King,” due out next week. Bolstered by a likely $100-million-plus opening weekend, New Line estimates the studio will gross $915 million, the best year in company history.

“Toby has quietly put together an impressive slate and developed great relationships with filmmakers,” says Mark Johnson, producer of “The Notebook,” due from New Line in April. “Look at ‘Elf.’ They took a chance on [film director] Jon Favreau, who’d never done a movie like that but had passion for the material. At a lot of other studios, he wouldn’t have even gotten in the door.”

Emmerich’s boss, New Line founder Bob Shaye, loathes the smug self-importance that so often afflicts studio executives, calling it “acquired situational narcissism.” So Emmerich is careful to downplay the rigors of his position, saying, “It’s not the hardest job on the planet.” But spending a day at the studio, seeing him in action, gave me a healthy respect for the complexity of his job.

One minute Emmerich is calculating the budget ceiling for an urban comedy with marginal overseas box-office potential. Then he’s reading rewrite pages for a film in production, trying to decide if they work creatively and fit into the film’s budget. Then he’s meeting with “American Pie’s” Jason Biggs, wooing him to do a New Line comedy, and talking music with OutKast’s Andre Benjamin, who’s eager to segue to acting from hip-hop stardom.

Rocky apprenticeship

What makes Emmerich’s performance especially impressive is that when Shaye and New Line Co-Chairman Michael Lynne picked him to replace Michael De Luca as head of production in early 2001, the move was greeted in Hollywood with snickers of derision.

Devoid of production experience, the amiable redhead, now 40, was viewed as a lightweight hired to be Shaye’s yes-man as he returned New Line to its low-budget, genre-film roots. Emmerich had been New Line’s head of music and a screenwriter (he wrote “Frequency,” a 2000 New Line release), two jobs that engendered little respect from Hollywood movers and shakers.

It was a rocky apprenticeship. Emmerich was slow to get films made, reinforcing his image as a Shaye puppet. The few movies that went into production were mostly sequels and remakes. Too many releases were flops, including “Willard,” “A Man Apart” and the reality-TV-inspired “The Real Cancun,” of which Emmerich says, “Let’s face it, it was a disaster.” By this spring, rumors were circulating that the newcomer’s job was in jeopardy.

“It was definitely rough,” he admits. “I didn’t have any relationships -- I didn’t know [top agents] Jeff Berg, Richard Lovett or Ari Emmanuel. Everyone must’ve thought, ‘This guy’s going to blow it.’ I’d get calls from people saying, ‘Is it true? Are you leaving?’ ”

It’s easy to underestimate Emmerich, who has a boyish eagerness to please, roaming New Line’s corridors accompanied by Bear, his white Labrador. When we had lunch a year ago, he said New Line was poised to have a string of hits. I thought to myself, this guy is in over his head. But Emmerich had the last laugh.

Why was the conventional wisdom so wrong? For one thing, Hollywood insiders are most impressed by -- surprise -- other Hollywood insiders. Coming from music -- he began his career running Atlantic Records’ soundtrack department -- Emmerich was both an outsider and an unknown quantity. He also had the misfortune of succeeding De Luca, a charismatic figure who successfully gambled on a slew of hip, artistically ambitious films before a string of costly flops undermined his relationship with Shaye.

Emmerich has little of De Luca’s daring. But he has capably executed Shaye’s game plan, which was to trim budgets and revive the studio’s valuable library of franchises. In 1999, three key movies were atop the studio’s development priority list: “Freddy vs. Jason,” a sequel to “The Mask” and “The Notebook.” For years, they languished. Since Emmerich arrived, all three have been made, with the “Mask” sequel now filming in Australia.

Emmerich also has overseen two money-making sequels, “Friday After Next” and “Final Destination 2,” as well as “Dumb and Dumberer,” which, despite terrible reviews, turned a modest profit. “It must’ve seemed like a hyper-conservative production slate,” he acknowledges. “But the mandate Bob and I agreed on was to get the franchises off the ground.”

Emmerich is especially vigilant about movie budgets. When he has a casting meeting with the agent and producers involved with a father-son road picture New Line wants to make with director Nick Cassavetes, Emmerich makes it clear that even the most enticing possibilities, be they Jack Nicholson or Paul Newman for the father, Matt Damon or Orlando Bloom for the son, are contingent on the movie budget’s remaining at $25 million. “I told Nick’s agent that I can get this movie made for $25 million, but that’s it,” he explains later. “He may not believe me, but that’s my breaking point -- I won’t make it for $25.5 million.”

A touchstone film

Emmerich’s populist choices reflect his own tastes. Most studio execs, asked to name their cinematic influences, recall the youthful rush of seeing “Shampoo” or “Taxi Driver.” Emmerich’s touchstone film is “The Hot Rock.”

When he was 10, growing up in Manhattan, he slipped off to see the noon showing of the caper comedy. Afterward, he got a sandwich, watched the 2 p.m. showing, had an ice cream sundae, returned for the 4 p.m. showing, and then went home to find his mother, hysterical, on the phone with the police.

He admits that New Line’s reliance on profit-and-loss projections favors safe genre movies, but he’s wary of making prestige movies just for the opportunity to have an Oscar contender. “To be honest, prestige is probably the last thing I focus on,” he says. “I want to make films that people will say, ‘That movie rocked!’ When I’m channel surfing and ‘Silence of the Lambs’ comes on, I have trouble turning it off. I wouldn’t say that about ‘Beautiful Mind.’ It’s a good movie, but I’m much more in awe of what Jonathan Demme did with ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ ”

It’s telling that Emmerich has special regard for the New Line staffer who’s in charge of selling the studio’s film to television. “Of everyone in our business, he’s the least susceptible to hype,” he says. “A lot of people in my job chase the heat. But you can outfox yourself by being too far ahead of the curve. I’d rather actually see the movie before I get excited.”

New Line still has some formidable challenges. Emmerich must put together a slate of films for 2005 without the benefit of another “Lord of the Rings” bonanza. The studio still has to find a niche for Mark Ordesky, the studio’s Fine Line subsidiary chief who’s been overseeing “Lord of the Rings” and is so well regarded that he could easily end up running a studio someday himself. And most important, Emmerich must sustain his creative partnership with Shaye, a famously demanding boss.

“I’m going to either succeed or fail by how well I function in that partnership,” says Emmerich. “Bob is very sensitive about any of us losing perspective when everyone is blowing smoke [at you] because they want your money. Put it this way: Bob doesn’t congratulate you when you get a movie greenlit. The congratulations come if the movie is successful.”

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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.