COMPANY TOWN : Why Big Producers Seek Small Stage Projects

Paramount Pictures-based producers Mace Neufeld and Bob Rehme, known for such large-scale movies as “Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger” and “Beverly Hills Cop 3,” are doing something out of character. They’re going small-scale. Low-budget. No stars.

The six-year partners are producing their first theatrical stage show, which will introduce the hip, young New York acting-musical troupe Instant Girl to the Hollywood community. The debut of “Instant Girl: Suburban Tango,” which debuts Nov. 1 at the Actor’s Gang Theater in Los Angeles for a five-week run, features a trio of 29-year-old Connecticut-born childhood buddies in a revue that combines singing and dancing in a series of original sketches.

“We see this as a great platform to move them into film and TV,” said Rehme, referring to the show’s stars and creators, Susan Trout, Janet Bogardus and Joanna Heimbold.

These are hardly the kind of household names--Harrison Ford, Sean Connery and Eddie Murphy--that Neufeld and Rehme have been associated with in movie-making.

Neufeld acknowledges that while “the financial rewards aren’t great, from a creative point of view . . . it’s very exciting.” The producers are used to seeing their films gross tens of millions of dollars at the box office, particularly those based on the Tom Clancy series of spy novels: “Clear and Present Danger” has sold $210-million worth of tickets worldwide; “Patriot Games” has $190 million, and “The Hunt for Red October,” which Neufeld produced before teaming with Rehme, has sold $203 million.

For Neufeld and Rehme, forays into theater can be fertile ground for producers to cull hot young actors, writers, directors and fresh ideas for film and television projects.

In making the crossover, they are hardly breaking new ground. Dabbling and investing in legit theater has long been a passion among some of Hollywood’s biggest movie producers and entrepreneurs--even though it’s usually no-win, financially speaking.

“There’s no business reason to do it,” said prolific Hollywood producer Scott Rudin, who has launched a number of Broadway shows, including the Tony-winning “Passion”; “Hamlet,” starring Ralph Fiennes, and the currently running “Indiscretions.”

“It’s a terrible business for a producer or an investor,” said Rudin, who has lost huge sums on such ill-fated productions as David Henry Hwang’s farce “Face Value,” which closed in previews and reportedly cost Rudin $1.2 million.

In theater, unlike movies, producers are not given big upfront fees but are guaranteed a small piece of the gross and a big share of the profits, which rarely materialize.

“It’s worse than the movies, if you can believe that,” said Rudin, whose big-screen credits include “The Addams Family” and “Sister Act” and their sequels, “The Firm,” and “Searching for Bobby Fischer.”

“It’s a business in which invariably you don’t make any money,” concurred entertainment mogul David Geffen, who’s invested in a dozen New York stage productions since the early 1980s, including “Dreamgirls,” “Cats,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” “M. Butterfly,” “Miss Saigon” and “Les Miserables.” Having said that, Geffen, who reportedly has invested $8 million to $10 million over the years, has actually made money, though as he says, “the amount of profit doesn’t equal the interest.”

Geffen said that “having one ‘Cats’ makes up for a lot of things.” According to one source, “Cats” returned Geffen 30 times his original $1-million investment.

According to a New York Times report, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘The Phantom of the Opera,” (in which Geffen was not an investor), has grossed receipts of $1.5 billion over nine years--more than the biggest hit movie yet made, “Jurassic Park.”

But between the few Broadway hits, the money-losers are too numerous to count.

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So why bother?

Geffen, who earlier this year gave a $5-million endowment to UCLA’s Westwood Playhouse (now renamed the Geffen Playhouse), said that while he no longer invests in theater, because he’s pouring his energies into DreamWorks SKG, he was intrigued with it for more than a decade simply because “I love the theater.”

Rudin, whose next Broadway production, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” starring Nathan Lane, opens in April, said: “I love doing it, and love the fact that it isn’t the movies. You don’t have to go to 20 people to get a yes on a project.”

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Neufeld and Rehme, who are obviously operating on a much smaller financial scale without the benefit of the prestige one gets from mounting a Broadway production, have another agenda.

“We’re not seeking prestige,” Rehme said. “We’re doing this to find new talent and ideas for film and television.”

Lauri Gladstein, who serves as their company’s director of development and who is credited with bringing Instant Girl to the producers’ attention, estimates that Paramount will invest about $75,000 to launch the show and pay the talent--chump change compared to the average studio movie.

“They probably won’t break even,” said Rehme. Added Neufeld: “But the shortfall will be an investment in the girls and the property.”

Under their longtime movie and TV deal with Paramount, the producers are already developing what they hope will be a half-hour sitcom for the Instant Girls trio.

“We want it to be offbeat like ‘The Larry Sanders Show,’ ” said Neufeld, whose daughter, Nancy (whose credits include staff writer on “In Living Color” and story editor on “Married With Children”), is currently working on creating a format to show off the actresses’ talents on celluloid.

“Instant Girl” isn’t Neufeld or Rehme’s first brush with theater.

Long before he partnered with Rehme, Neufeld produced the 1981 Broadway show “The Flying Karamazov Brothers” in association with Viacom Pictures at the Ritz Theater, followed by an hourlong television version for Showtime Cable Network.

When Rehme was a top executive at Universal Pictures in the early ‘80s, that studio also financed some theatrical productions, including “Doonesbury” on Broadway and “The Wild Life” Off-Broadway.

Rehme and Neufeld say that while someday they’d love to produce a Broadway show, they’re happy just to get “Instant Girl” off the ground.

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And by no means are the producers turning away from film and TV. They have about a dozen TV projects and about 25 in movies, including three scripts based on a series of Hollywood detective novels by Michael Connolly, which they hope will spawn a continuing character a la Jack Ryan in the Clancy series.