Gambler is betting millions on this track

As Hollywood publicity events go, the “Redline” celebrity car race was not the town’s hottest ticket. The exotic car contest drew a couple of recognizable celebrities -- actor Jackie Chan, rapper Wyclef Jean -- but other boldfaced names were few and far between.

And then Eddie Griffin climbed behind the wheel of “Redline” producer Daniel Sadek’s cherry red Ferrari Enzo.

The “Undercover Brother” star immediately steered the $1.3-million car off course as he circled the Irwindale Speedway’s track. He plowed over a number of traffic cones, then slammed the Enzo into a concrete wall, smashing its front end.

Suddenly, the little promotion for the new racing movie was big news.

Helicopters from local TV stations were soon circling the raceway, and the March 26 “Redline” crash blanketed national and local channels. YouTube visitors watched replays of Griffin’s wreck nearly 3 million times.

Skeptics quickly pronounced it a media stunt, suggesting it was staged. Sadek, 38, who was briefly inconsolable after the crash, insists that’s not the case. But if the destruction of the exotic (and, he says, uninsured) car helps sell “Redline” tickets, all the better: Sadek personally bankrolled production of the film, which opened Friday in about 1,800 theaters nationwide, and has taken the almost unheard of step of distributing it himself, all at a combined cost of roughly $55 million.

Griffin’s crash, in other words, was either a brilliantly lucky PR break or a harbinger of the dangerous road ahead.

Near the conclusion of “Redline,” in which four high rollers enter their exotic cars in a winner-take-all $100-million road race, a character named Jerry Bracken (Tim Matheson) remarks, “What’s a gamble if you don’t gamble?”

It’s a line that Sadek -- who holds “Redline’s” story credit and also likes to play cards -- takes personally.

Sadek, who was born in Beirut and raised in France, came to the United States at age 17. He and a partner subsequently built their upstart mortgage business into a national company (Costa Mesa’s Quick Loan Funding), and now Sadek invests in real estate, restaurants (Newport’s Ten Asian Bistro and Cafe Panini) and some very, very expensive cars.

“I’ve always been a fan of fast cars,” he says.

The driveway of Sadek’s Newport Coast mansion looks like some high school kid’s poster collection come to life. There’s the crashed Ferrari Enzo, a Ferrari 599, a Lamborghini Murcielago, a Saleen S7, a Ford GT40 and, for tooling around town, a Maybach 62. Sadek allowed another one of his cars, a $575,000 Porsche Carrera GT, to be wrecked during filming of a “Redline” action sequence.

“People never get to see cars like this anymore,” Sadek says. “A lot of them are not even in the car shows.”

But the movie didn’t start as a way to get Sadek’s cars some screen time.

Instead, it began with Sadek’s former fiancee, actress Nadia Bjorlin.

After playing Chloe Lane on the soap opera “Days of Our Lives,” Bjorlin, 26, started auditioning for movie roles. “I saw what she had to go through -- driving every day from Newport to Los Angeles, and I never saw her get anything,” Sadek says. “I watched her struggle. And I wanted people to see her talent.”

So Sadek conceived “Redline” as a movie for Bjorlin. She plays Natasha, a mechanic and singer whose father died in a car crash. She’s an expert driver but is forbidden by her mother from racing. Before long, though, she’s forced to put the pedal to the metal.

The film features high-speed races down the Las Vegas strip and across the desert, and a trip or two around the Irwindale Speedway. In addition to Bjorlin and Matheson, the film costars Griffin and Jesse Johnson, Don Johnson’s son. Stunt coordinator Andy Cheng (“Rush Hour,” “The Rundown”) makes his directorial debut.

“I’ve heard every reason why not to do it,” Sadek says of investing $34 million in the film’s production and at least $21 million in its marketing. “Everybody told me I shouldn’t do it -- that I’d lose my money. But people got to the moon: Somebody was staring up at the moon one day and decided to get up there.”

Sadek isn’t the first person to spend a small fortune making his own movie. What makes his effort even riskier, though, is deciding to distribute “Redline” himself. Most independent producers, even if they bankroll a production, ultimately sell their film to a Lionsgate or a Miramax and let them market and distribute the film.

There are several reasons why that is the safer course. Without a steady supply of films, there’s no carrot for the independent distributor to dangle in front of theater owners. If Sony wants a multiplex to keep playing its “Are We Done Yet?,” the theater might give the studio a break as it also has “Spider-Man 3.” It’s also difficult to get your coming-attraction trailers played if you don’t have the clout a slate of films carries.

Then there’s the issue of getting paid. As Mel Gibson found out when he essentially distributed “The Passion of the Christ” himself, it’s hard to get theaters to settle up if you don’t have a future slate of films they want (Gibson ultimately had to sue the nation’s largest chain, Regal Entertainment, to get what he says Regal owed him).

Larry Gleason, who is handling “Redline’s” distribution, knows how perilous independent distribution can be. When he worked at Mann Theatres, he told his accounting department, “ ‘Don’t pay the independents until a day before they take you to court,’ ” Gleason recalls.

Gleason, who formerly ran MGM’s distribution unit, previously was the president of marketing and distribution at the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, the late-1980s here-today-gone-tomorrow producer and distributor of such fiascoes as “King Kong 2,” “Million Dollar Mystery” and “Maximum Overdrive.”

“We just had no product,” Gleason says of DEG, adding that the same problem doomed other independent distributors, including the Weintraub Entertainment Group (“Troop Beverly Hills” and “My Stepmother Is an Alien”) and Vestron Pictures (“Dirty Dancing” but also “Earth Girls Are Easy”).

Sadek hopes his company, Chicago Pictures, can eventually release half a dozen movies a year, some of which he will develop and produce and some of which will be completed films he acquires. His 2007 slate includes the Sundance Film Festival title “If I Had Known I Was a Genius” (which also stars Bjorlin) and Seann William Scott and Gretchen Mol in “Trainwreck: My Life as an Idiot.”

As Sadek laid out his plans for Chicago Pictures on a recent night at Ten, his phone wouldn’t stop ringing -- any number of last-minute problems kept interrupting his meal. At one point, his media buyer called to say he was hitting a few roadblocks while trying to buy television time. “Anything that I can buy, I’ll take,” Sadek said into his mobile phone.

A subsequent call was more worrisome. Some prints of the film had been shipped out without digital sound discs in the can. It would take a couple of days to remedy the problem, but Sadek didn’t seem concerned.

“I’m not nervous,” he said, digging into his tofu. “Even if the movie doesn’t do well financially, if people see the movie and say they enjoyed it, that to me is success.”

Audience-tracking surveys show “Redline” appeals to young boys and men but isn’t making as big a dent with women. The film isn’t likely to capture four-star reviews, though, and Sadek didn’t show it to critics before its release.

“This movie was never made to win an Academy Award,” Sadek says. “But I think for my audience it’s a really good movie.”

In fact, he’s already developing “Redline 2.”

john.horn@latimes.com