A doc maker with a spin

Kobe BRYANT may have settled out of court with his Colorado accuser, but he still hasn’t made good with disgruntled fans and leery endorsers. Yet it’s a good bet he’ll smell like a gardenia by midsummer: He’s just been taken on by Dan Klores, the tough-talking New York publicist and crisis manager. Earlier this week, Klores also picked up former “Sopranos” actor Vincent Pastore, whose fiancee claims he assaulted her on a SoHo street. While Klores also handles corporate accounts such as General Motors, Fox News and New Balance, this is his niche: There’s always been a lust in his heart for the uniquely uphill battle of complete celebrity image renovation.

That’s why, at the Sundance Film Festival in 2003, it was as if a whole different Dan Klores had co-directed the thoughtful documentary “The Boys of 2nd Street Park.” His second documentary airs April 20 on USA Network -- it’s called “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story,” and it’s an intelligent, careful treatment of the life of the boxer Emile Griffith following his killing, in the ring, of Benny “The Kid” Paret in Madison Square Garden in 1962. Klores sold the rights for a scripted feature of that film, with Scott Rudin as producer, to Sony and Paramount. He’s editing another -- “Viva Baseball,” which sold to the cable network Spike -- and shooting yet one more. And scheming up another.

It’s one of the more unexpected double lives in recent Hollywood memory; the fantastical narratives of celebrity damage control seem to demand radically different impulses than those of a good documentarian. Klores had begun filming “The Boys of 2nd Street Park” in 2001, and the PR business certainly carried on: It was, you may recall, Dan Klores Communications and its famed crisis interventions that saved Paris Hilton from her night-vision nightmare.

Klores -- the filmmaking Klores -- operates out of the industrial far-west SoHo area; the office of his production company, Shoot the Moon, and his small editing room are here. On a recent Friday, he sat in the very back corner of Kenny’s Coffee House, a greasy spoon nearby, and inexplicably ordered a decaf coffee and a Diet Coke to keep his cellphone, BlackBerry and call sheet company.

His accent is unadulterated Brooklyn, his speech alternately super rapid and thoughtful, often larded with big names that clash with his every-dude manner -- and he was surprised that anyone had been surprised to find him behind the camera.

“I was unaware of this. I was too vain to understand it then. I called people while I was making ‘Boys of 2nd Street Park’ ” -- that first film -- “and I called my pal Jim Dwyer who did that piece in the Times Magazine, I don’t know if you read it, and he told me later on, he says, ‘Yeah, you know, I was coming up there to see it because, you know, you asked me to, but I was sort of like, what ... is this?’ And then I have a friend who’s the editor of Paper magazine, you know, and he said the same thing -- he wrote it! And I was saying, how can they think that?”

How couldn’t they? Watching Lizzie Grubman hiss and spit her way through her MTV reality show “PoweR Girls” has only cemented our impression of publicists. And at a small, friendly, Manhattan screening of “Ring of Fire” a week previous, there was every publicist’s living cautionary tale, blond Grubman herself, standing outside the theater smoking and cackling with friends.

“Everyone turned down ‘Viva Baseball.’ Typical show business....” Klores said. “Cuz it wasn’t theirs.... ‘Ring of Fire’ was turned down by a network that was a natural for it cuz it wasn’t the guy’s idea.”

He knows, however, how to get what he wants -- for example, the presentation of “Ring of Fire” is USA’s first commercial-free film broadcast. “In the beginning, I was saying this film would work a lot better without commercials. I don’t like the idea of commercials. And that’s all I said. But I said it enough.”

But I said it enough. Let’s be honest: Disparate as they may seem, the two lives of Dan Klores coexist happily, although bringing the publicizing talents of a Klores to bear on this small, tasteful documentary is like using a nuclear bomb to clean the john. Somehow, “Ring of Fire” has not been out of the news since Sundance, and while Hollywood is certainly swimming in fantastic documentaries, that’s not because it’s riding that crest. The film gets name-checked in Page Six and in the trades, and it’s kept alive in the mind of the marketplace. And Klores doesn’t face, in the slightest, the financial challenges that beset nearly all other documentary filmmakers (in fact, he said, he recently turned down the job of “CEO of a major sports and entertainment entity”).

So he’s had a leg or three up, but still: Why, or how, isn’t Dan Klores a pig? And why has he waited until this second act to prove that?

In his youth, Klores had what they call an authority problem. Did a lot of drugs, got thrown out of three or four colleges after high school, and “got straight” in 1973. He began a PhD in U.S. history, taught on a Navy ship, became a freelancer for some New York publications -- “cops and robbers stuff.” Got a PR job for an abortion clinic in Queens, moved on to a political campaign in Nassau County, ended up at Howard Rubenstein’s famous PR firm, represented a union of taxi drivers. “And from there, I realized this was the newspaper business! If I think like an editor, and I think news, create news, I’ll be really good at it.” And soon he opened his own shop: Rubenstein, he said, “was never going to give me a piece, number one, cuz he’s got a couple sons....”

Klores’ stock in trade is manufacturing for larger-than-life types a slippery sort of self-effacing simulacra of all-too-human normality -- actually, even more dangerous, he supplies others with the materials to make them, and the process is incredibly natural. His outlandish talents in this department are certainly applied to himself.

Here’s his story about courting his current wife, Abbe Goldman: “I left my first wife in ‘85, ‘86? I met her” -- Goldman -- “in 1990. Went to South Africa with Paul Simon in January ‘91, with the Graceland band, Mandela opened it up. I’d dealt with the [African National Congress] for many months making sure it’d be a peaceful trip. The first time we got there they bombed our hotel. They had bodyguards all over Abbe, she didn’t work for me, we worked together” -- at Rubenstein -- “before we left our friendship had blossomed, we became lovers, I think, one time. So in South Africa, it was possible we could die. One day, seven guys with guns came up, the Tanzanian youth group. So, I called her, said, ‘Abbe, I can’t wait to see you’ -- and there’s no response. We went out to dinner, and she was like, it’s not good, it’s not good for me, I really like my job. If it doesn’t work out, it’s not good for me. So she broke up with me. But I got her back the next day. I wrote her a funny note. It was a good note -- I stayed up all night thinking about it. Now we’ve got three little ones -- 7, one will be 4, one will be 2. It’s pretty cool, man.”

A volatile scene, life and death on the line; a woman; famous names; a change of life; a man grows up. It’s the perfect story, allusive and impressive.

Here’s Klores on taking clients: “And I won’t take anything. I didn’t take Sean Combs for years and years. But then he called me -- remember when he beat up that guy? His lawyer called me, and [Combs] told me the truth. ‘I did it, I made a mistake.’ And I said, why don’t you apologize? ‘Because the lawyers won’t let me.’ And I said, forget the lawyers.”

And Paris Hilton: “They came to me and I had one rule: If you don’t listen to me, I’m out. That’s it, I’m out. At any time. The parents. And I took it just like I would anything. I’m gonna take it, I’m gonna get you through this and I don’t wanna represent you, go to PMK, go somewhere else. My firm won’t do it.”

Super real, yet picture-perfect paragraphs.

The PR guy as client

After decades of talking to the press, of beating and seducing and beguiling the trades and gossips and reporters, surely Dan Klores is his own best client.

Which may be why he has hired his own publicist. “I had to hire my own PR people, which was OK, he’s very good, this guy Tom at Leslee Dart’s group, ya know? He’s very good. Cuz I don’t want my team doing this. Very weird, very weird.”

One of the moves this publicist made was to messenger over, clearly at Klores’ command, a photocopy of a short article about hepatitis C from Esquire’s January 2001 issue. It’s a moving first-person account of an awful yearlong treatment -- “Tylenol, ribavirin, interferon, Ambien, and Zoloft,” and support groups, breathlessness, agony -- written by Anonymous.

Anonymous is Dan Klores. Though he’s talked about it just a bit for public consumption, the serious-illness story isn’t perhaps one Klores felt he could spiel out as he mashed the ice in his Diet Coke. But, as a professional storyteller, he knows it’s the absolute best story: I almost died and so I changed my life.

And it’s the reason his two lives have been beaten into one. “I have a film coming out,” he said, “I’m editing a film, I’m shooting another, I’m writing the plan for another, and I’m making a deal for another. Why am I doing all this out of clay? Why am I -- and I feel the natural answer is that I’m just catching up. Ya know? I’m catching up. I’m avoiding something also -- but I don’t know what it is.”

There’s a way in which Klores is a mensch, an old-school guy with a good heart and some swagger, probably a nightmare to work for sometimes, sure, but loyal. He’s another middle-aged guy who got smacked hard by mortality and realized he was missing out. And -- “but I don’t know what it is” -- there’s that something else. Maybe it’s that screwed-up kid who’d rather go see a Grateful Dead show than go to class. Wouldn’t it be a relief, he’s got to be thinking, to just not publicize something, just for a day?

But it would be foolish to say, hey man, I’ll make the movies and let them go out there and live or die.

“Look, the producing side is business. I’m good at it because I understand marketing. Right? Ya know? But making films, it’s what I’m in love with -- I feel like I’ve come home. I feel like I, I’m where I belong. I’m 55, and I have no idea how this sounds, but I have never been happier in my entire life. And I’m not a guy who’s walking around with a big smile on his face most of the time.”

The spoils of publicity give a solid thrill, but in the end, they don’t belong to the publicist. They accrue instead to the overly handsy newsman or “exhausted” diva. Maybe Klores simply needed to no longer have the triumphs and failures -- these stories as they’re lived -- belong emotionally to someone else.

“I’ve seen people fail, and as bad as -- you know ... because, I love Paul Simon. I lived through the failure of ‘The Capeman’ ” -- Simon’s doomed Broadway musical, for which Klores was a producer -- “with him, which was extremely painful for me. But I never understood the real depth of pain he had to endure till now -- and we were very, very close. Still are. And I’d get -- I’d say, Paul! And he’d be too busy. And now I understand.”