Taking some mighty swings

Jose Canseco has decided he’d like to be Hollywood’s newest action hero. For this latest post-baseball career move he didn’t turn to those powerful, well-connected agents, like the Jeff Bergs of the world, who can make just about anyone a star.

Instead, he hired a little-known producer named Bob DeBrino as his personal manager.

In many ways, DeBrino, whose limited credits include a low-budget comedy, “Shut Up and Shoot!” about a crooked Hollywood producer, is the real story here. He has chased his Hollywood dream ever since he got his first taste of show business as a cop in New York working security on the set of “The Godfather.”

Tall and lanky with a perpetual tan and a booming, impossible-to-ignore voice, the 54-year-old producer drives around town in a low-slung, fire engine red Corvette convertible, cellphone always at the ready.

He’s got Canseco making the rounds of film studios, TV networks and production companies, complete with a demo tape that features the 6-foot-4 former slugger, a black belt in martial arts, deftly twirling a numchuck as a sultry woman in a nightgown lounges nearby. Another scene, shot with Canseco’s 8-year-old daughter, Josie, is designed to showcase his more sensitive side.

The idea is to convince casting directors that Canseco, who retired in 2001 with 462 home runs, has the sculpted look, acting chops and martial-arts skills to transform him into the next Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, Seagal or Van Damme.

Here’s how the pitch sounds. “I’m only 41 and in great shape for my age,” Canseco said. “I don’t think I’ve lost a beat at all. Because of my physique and my look ... I fit in the natural action-hero role.”

DeBrino, by contrast, would probably not be any casting director’s choice for the role of Hollywood power player. Just two years ago, the 6-foot-3 DeBrino weighed 453 pounds. After prodding from his Hollywood pals, including Al Pacino’s family, he underwent gastric-bypass surgery and has trimmed down to 202.

He’s a former narc, who barely escaped the trade after his Bronx home was firebombed in 1975, possibly by traffickers. He got out unscathed.

His cousin, Angelo Prisco, a reputed mob figure, was paroled only last week from a New Jersey state prison after serving time for racketeering and arson. DeBrino and a film crew were there to record his release and have hopes of making a Gotti-like reality TV show starring Prisco and his family.

For a brief time this year, DeBrino was Tom Sizemore’s personal manager as the actor continued to struggle with drug addiction and his conviction for beating up his ex-girlfriend, former “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss. “Seems like everybody that comes my way is controversial,” said DeBrino.

When he first came to Hollywood, DeBrino readily admits, he wanted to become a producer so badly that he was overly aggressive, which turned people off.

“I made a lot of mistakes,” DeBrino said. “I did stupid things. I barged into people’s offices. Went in unannounced. Called them. Was extremely overaggressive, boisterous. I hope people forgive me for my mistakes. I was just a stupid, dumb ox that was going around with my own version about what Hollywood was. I must have scared half the people out here.

“I chased [Nick Nolte] for years,” he added. “I remember I went up to his house and threw a script over a wall once.” He now regrets doing that.

“I’m not Steven Spielberg or Tom Hanks where I can pick up a phone and I can be in a film [instantly] or say, ‘Hey, I’m coming out, get ready for me.’ Every meeting, every phone call that I get is work. And it’s just the system.”

Even today, DeBrino’s style remains in-your-face. While driving through Beverly Hills one recent afternoon, DeBrino spotted producer and former TriStar Pictures studio chief Mike Medavoy eating at an outside table.

DeBrino bounded from the SUV, dodged traffic as he ran across the street and, standing in front of Medavoy, threw open his jacket to show off how much weight he had lost, as startled diners looked on.

Over the years, DeBrino has optioned the film rights to many promising literary works but found it an uphill battle to get the projects made. There was a book titled “Trump Tower,” which he couldn’t get cast. There was an option that ran out on another book called “Rough Magic” about troubled poet Sylvia Plath that never got off the ground. (Someone else made a movie about Plath with Gwyneth Paltrow last year.) And he had high hopes for a TV police drama called “NYPD Confidential,” until “NYPD Blue” came along.

He has a six-month option on the film rights to Canseco’s book, “Juiced,” which, while roundly trashed by critics, still managed to rock major league baseball with its accounts of steroid use among some of the game’s top players, including Canseco himself. The book is being shopped to various studios.

“He has good instincts,” said producer Edward Pressman, who once worked with DeBrino in trying to develop a film based on a book called “The Vatican Connection.”

DeBrino has a knack for schmoozing and counts many celebrities as friends. He often carried a scrapbook containing photographs of him posing with stars such as Dennis Quaid, Mel Gibson, Robert De Niro, Brooke Shields and Johnny Depp. It crushed him when he recently lost the scrapbook at Los Angeles International Airport.

“He’s definitely a character,” Pressman said of DeBrino. “He’s got a compulsion and obsession to produce movies and be connected, which is remarkable.... Sometimes I think he’s so obsessed by his drive that he kind of gets too pushy and he gets people unnerved.”

DeBrino first met Canseco in April when the producer was walking through the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Fla., trying to persuade a tribal officer to invest $500,000 in private gaming funds in a low-budget indie movie that DeBrino was filming in Miami.

The Canseco connection was a godsend for DeBrino. He not only acquired the option on “Juiced,” but he also signed on as Canseco’s manager.

Canseco, who has been on probation after a bar brawl four years ago, now makes L.A. his home. He lives in an Italian villa-style home in the hills of Encino, overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

In recent weeks, he has been accompanied to various Hollywood watering holes by DeBrino, who has introduced him to actors such as Meg Ryan, Dolph Lundgren and the Baldwin brothers.

Canseco already has a little experience in front of the camera, having appeared in VH1’s celebrity-driven reality show “The Surreal Life.” But the demo tape is helping. “I think there is strong potential for his future in this business,” said Pamela Shae, senior vice president of talent and casting for Spelling Television Inc. “He seems very committed to this next chapter in his life. I truly feel that [casting him] is something I want to entertain. I was very, very excited to meet him.” “My job now is to get him before as many people as possible,” DeBrino said.

It is that commitment that persuaded Canseco to make DeBrino his manager.

“I’m completely impressed by how many people he knows,” Canseco said. “He’s gotten me in front of every major producer, writer, director. We’ve had meetings -- two or three a day. He goes out there and gets stuff done, and that’s what I like about him.” DeBrino seems to favor unconventional alliances. In 2001, he invited several celebrities, including action star Steven Seagal, to East Jersey State Prison in Woodbridge Township to meet his cousin, Prisco, who was then serving a 12-year sentence for racketeering and arson. According to newspaper accounts, Prisco was identified in his 1994 indictment as a high-ranking member, or capo, in the Genovese crime family who oversaw operations in New Jersey.

Seagal testified that during the prison visit he asked Prisco for protection from the Gambino crime family and, in return, paid Prisco’s lawyer $10,000 to help speed his release from jail, according to a report Sunday by Gannett’s New Jersey state bureau.

DeBrino disputes that account, saying he merely brought the celebrities to see his cousin in order to encourage Prisco to get involved in Hollywood after his parole.

DeBrino said he even persuaded Prisco to take up screenwriting. According to the Record of Bergen County, N.J., Prisco did just that, co-writing a script about aliens from outer space who save the Earth.

Trifecta Entertainment Chief Executive Hank Cohen, a former president of MGM Television Entertainment, credits DeBrino with bringing his production company together with Prisco on the reality TV project. Cohen said if the project gets the green light, DeBrino will become executive producer and help run the show.

“He’s like an old-fashioned showman,” Cohen said of DeBrino. “He’s bigger than life. ... I think if someone harnesses Bob and keeps him focused, there is a lot of business [to do] with Bob. He knows so many people and has so many ideas.... His energy and enthusiasm are really infectious.”

It’s already shaping up as a good year for DeBrino. In addition to his Canseco-related enterprises, he has landed a producer credit on director Sidney Lumet’s next film, “Find Me Guilty,” a Mafia trial drama starring Vin Diesel, and has completed a documentary on the life of South America’s 17th century general and liberator Simon Bolivar, which he shot in Venezuela.

“He never gives up,” said producer Dan Blatt, who has known him for years. “That’s the Bob DeBrino story.”