Once a Critic, Now a Player

The night tumbles down on the quiet Westside residential street of Spanish-style bungalows and trim lawns as the ragtag gamblers trickle in and take their seats behind the Poker Table--not just any table, mind you, but the same used in the 1992 comedy “Honeymoon in Vegas.”

The gamblers--all of whom work in the entertainment business--go by various monikers: Ahkman (a derivation of Aw C’mon). Dog. The Admiral. Heinz. Antoine. The Weather Boy. The Sheriff. And Rouge.

This is where you will find Rod Lurie one night a week, sitting in a cramped room dubbed the “permanent poker zimmer [room]” next to his card-playing, barbecue-munching pals. The repartee seesaws between clutch-your-stomach funny and off-color. The air is thick with the pungent smell of Cuban-made Montecristos that leave everyone’s clothes reeking for days.

After two hands, Rouge Lurie is already down $250 and the football game on the TV in the corner isn’t making matters any better. His team is down 19-6 in the fourth quarter.

But then Lady Luck plants a kiss. To the groans of his opponents, Rouge plops down his cards: an ace, 2, 3, 4 and 5--the unbeatable low hand and a straight that was the superior high hand, thus entitling him to the entire pot. Rouge leans over the “Honeymoon in Vegas” table and scoops up $450 in chips.

Like his poker game on this warm September night, Lurie’s fledging film career has seen many ups and downs. Yet, with the release Friday of his new political thriller, “The Contender,” Lurie is now on a roll.

Who could have imagined that this former film critic for Los Angeles magazine, whose acerbic reviews landed in Hollywood’s mailboxes like hand grenades in the early to mid-1990s, would now be doing business with Steven Spielberg and be toasted at the Toronto Film Festival?

After all, this was a critic whose reviews, he said, read like “your next-door-neighbor after a couple of beers.”

For example, Warner Bros. once banned him from screenings for an entire year after he wrote that Danny DeVito’s appearance was akin to “a testicle with arms.” Undaunted, Lurie managed to sneak into various Warner Bros. research screenings during the ban.

“I can be accused of a lot of things,” Lurie said recently. “I can be accused of being acerbic as a critic and writer. I can be accused of not being a good critic and writer. But I don’t think you’ll find one person who will say I was a kiss-ass.”

However, he now concedes, there were times when he went too far.

“I crossed the line with Danny DeVito and I crossed the line often with the way people look personally,” he said. “Now that I make films, I understand those are merely cheap shots.” When he wrote those things, Lurie explained, it was “more writing to amuse myself” than anything else.

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Today, Lurie has accomplished what few film critics ever accomplish--successfully making the leap from reviewing movies to making them. Not bad for a guy who never attended film school.

His fortunes have risen on the strength of “The Contender,” which he wrote and directed. Set in Washington, the film features a powerful cast headlined by Gary Oldman, Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges and Christian Slater.

Allen plays Sen. Laine Hanson, who is chosen by a Democratic president (Bridges) to replace a deceased vice president. Her appointment touches off a firestorm on Capitol Hill, where a wily committee chairman, Congressman Shelly Runyan (Oldman), tries to quash her nomination by dredging up an old college sex scandal.

“I knew I wanted to make a movie about a woman coming into power,” Lurie said, “and how would people deal with that.”

Allen, Oldman and Bridges are all receiving early Oscar buzz for their performances.

Indeed, on a recent episode of “Ebert & Roeper and the Movies,” critic Roger Ebert said that Allen is sure to be an Academy Award contender as best actress this year, while fellow critic Richard Roeper went further, christening her “the favorite.”

The way Lurie tells it, he wrote the movie out of his undying admiration of Allen as an actress. She earned Oscar nominations as Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” and again for her role in “The Crucible.”

The 38-year-old Lurie broached the idea of writing a screenplay at the 1999 L.A. Film Critics Assn. awards dinner.

“I sat down with Joan, who is a model of elegance, who said, ‘You should really do that,’ ” Lurie added. “Her agent said, ‘I promise we’ll read it.’ The truth is, I had no idea what I was going to write. All I knew, I had to write a role that Joan Allen could not say no to.”

Once Allen was on board, Lurie’s first choice as president was Paul Newman, but as far as he knew, Newman never opened the script. Lurie then asked himself, who’s the young Paul Newman?, and came up with Jeff Bridges.

“I went up to Santa Barbara to see him,” Lurie recalled. “I spent three hours with him. He was incredibly dude-like. Laid-back. He was eating muffin after muffin and we were going over the screenplay. As we were walking back to the car, he said to me, “The dude as president. Who would have thought it?’

“I get in my car, he knocks on the window and I roll it down, and he says, ‘Now, Joan Allen is locked in, right?’ He would only do it at that point if Joan Allen had agreed to do it.”

Bridges admits that it was “kind of surprising” to see how Lurie had gone from critic to director. “In a way it was tough,” the actor said. “He’s burned a lot of bridges. He was speaking his mind, not mincing any words when he was giving his critiques.”

Lurie’s against-type casting of western actor Sam Elliott as the president’s button-down chief of staff met initial opposition, but Elliott’s performance has drawn raves. Lurie told the tall, lean actor with the bushy mustache and slow drawl to shave the mustache, clip the hair and don a three-piece suit. As a result, Elliott may have created an entirely new film persona for himself.

“I will always be indebted to Rod--whether this thing is successful in the marketplace or not--for sticking his neck out for me,” Elliott said.

Lurie also had heard horror stories about Slater on other movie sets, but when he arrived on the set, the actor had literally become “Christian” Slater. “He has found God and he is happy as a lark,” Lurie said. Before every scene, not knowing Lurie could hear him through his earphones, Slater would say, “God goes before me.”

Lurie and his producing partner, Marc Frydman, had shopped the project around to major studios, but they weren’t interested in a film about American politics--unless Allen was replaced with one of Hollywood’s A-list actresses. The filmmakers thought that would dramatically alter the film they had set out to make, so they went to Europe and obtained $9.5 million in financing from Munich-based Cinerenta.

With the film completed, Lurie began showing “The Contender” around town to smaller studios such as New Line Cinema, Miramax and Destination Films. Then Spielberg’s office called, asking if he could see the film that night at his house--and, oh, could he also have Lurie’s home phone number to call him afterward.

Lurie and his wife, Gretchen, who have two children--a 9-year-old son, Hunter, and an 8-year-old daughter, Paige--canceled their plans to go out that evening waited by the phone.

“I put on ‘Schindler’s List’ because when he called, I wanted him to hear it in the background, to be honest,” Lurie admitted. “And I remember watching the movie and saying to Gretchen, ‘How can the man who made “Schindler’s List” be interested in my film?’ ”

The call never came that night, but the phone was ringing the next morning. Spielberg loved the movie.

“To be honest, they didn’t give us the best deal,” Lurie said, “but it was DreamWorks, the best marketing team in the world, and Steven Spielberg, so we agreed to go with them.”

Two weeks later, Lurie found himself in an editing room next to Spielberg, who was showing him how to tweak certain scenes to make them even better.

Rouge knew a winning hand when he was dealt one.

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The poker boys sit around the “Honeymoon in Vegas” table bluffing and being bluffed.

Seated around the table are professional magician and stand-up comic Larry “Dog” Wilson; publicist Tony “Antoine” Angellotti; former “Chicago Hope” executive producer Dennis “the Admiral” Cooper; Channel 11’s Fox News weather-caster Mark “The Weatherboy” Thompson; rock ‘n’ roll manager Ron “The Sheriff” Stone; writer-actor-director Mike Binder; “Jaws” screenwriter Carl “Heinz” Gottlieb; and John “Ahkman” De Simio, who during the game dons a black eye patch and a brown hat made of parabuntal straw. Actor Kevin Pollak, a regular at the poker games, is on location in North Carolina making a movie on this night.

These weekly card games have been important to Lurie’s filmmaking.

Binder, for instance, has a supporting role in “The Contender” and starred in Lurie’s first short film, “4 Second Delay,” and Lurie is executive producer on Binder’s new film, “The Search for John Gissing.” Pollak starred in Lurie’s first feature-length film, “Deterrence,” which also featured weatherman Thompson. De Simio is unit publicist on “The Contender” and Angellotti is the publicist for Lurie’s production company, Battleground Productions.

“There are some really good card minds at this table,” Thompson says. “I think Rouge is a very strong player. . . . He is very aggressive. If someone opens five, he’d make it a 10 because he’s trying to muscle other players out of the game. That’s his style.”

West said it doesn’t surprise him that Lurie has transformed himself from critic to director because, as a West Point graduate, Lurie has been trained in how to accomplish your goals on the battlefield.

“Rod looked around and he saw the kind of films that were being made and he figured out that the key is to get good actors with good stories,” West said. “So, he sits down and writes films that actors can’t say no to. What’s the name of his production company? Battleground Productions. It’s no accident.”

Lurie’s unlikely career path from critic to director is one of Hollywood’s stranger journeys.

Born in Israel and raised in Greenwich, Conn., Lurie is the son of famed political cartoonist Ranan Lurie. Politics spiced dinner table conversations and Lurie became fascinated with the Watergate scandal as a youth.

Yearning for independence from his parents, Lurie entered West Point in 1980 but bristled at the discipline imposed on plebes.

He admits he was a wise guy and estimates he served 200 hours confined to his room.

While in the service, he became film critic for a small paper in Greenwich and simultaneously received permission from a New York news syndicate to use its letterhead to get himself onto movie junkets so he could do celebrity interviews.

The first professional interview he ever conducted went badly. During a press junket for the 1986 film “The Morning After,” actress Jane Fonda, dubbed “Hanoi Jane” by her critics during the Vietnam War, sat down at a table and greeted all the reporters, including Lurie.

Lurie popped the question: “Miss Fonda, is there any reason why this country should not view you as a traitor?” The next actor to sit down was Jeff Bridges, Fonda’s co-star in the film.

While honeymooning in Las Vegas, Lurie and his wife made a stopover in L.A. and Lurie told her, “This is where it is at.” So, with $10,000 they received at their wedding, they put a down payment on two cars and paid the first month’s rent.

He landed an assignment with Los Angeles magazine after convincing the editor that he had the inside track on Robert Bardo, the stalker who killed actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989. Lurie now admits he had no such inside track, that all he knew about the murder was what he read in the newspaper.

However, with helpful leaks from a prosecutor in the L.A. County district attorney’s office, Lurie delivered a meaty story and was subsequently named an investigative reporter.

He would go on to expose a sourcing scandal at the National Enquirer, a story that gained him national attention on “60 Minutes,” Larry King and “Good Morning America,” and he wrote a 1995 true crime book called “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the story of a con man who sucked money out of film investors by pretending to be a producer.

Meanwhile, Lew Harris, then editor of Los Angeles magazine, was casting around for a different kind of film critic--one with an attitude--and Lurie fit the bill.

“He actually created this character of Rod Lurie, in a sense, although he made this character much more aggressive than I expected,” Harris recalled.

Lurie was accused of being homophobic in his 1991 review of Gus Van Sant’s film “My Own Private Idaho,” which starred River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. Lurie wrote that it “was not my cup of swill. . . .” He added: “I know it may sound homophobic and backward, but I’d rather see the private videos of Jim and Tammy Faye.”

“The homophobic thing,” Lurie says today, “is a matter of interpretation. I’ll use the cliche and say, I have a tremendous amount of gay friends. . . . I was being funny, I think.”

Harris, who is now editor of Internet films portal IFilm, said he once got an earful from Whoopi Goldberg after Lurie ripped the African American actress for taking too many roles as maids.

“I’m on vacation and I get a call in the hotel room from Whoopi,” Harris recalled. “She said, ‘How could you do this?’ It was, in fact, true, but her complaint was that she wasn’t being offered anything else.”

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Lurie began to soften his abrasive image while hosting a popular Saturday-morning film review show on KABC radio in Los Angeles from 1995 to 1999. Mel Gibson, James Cameron and Martin Landau all mentioned Lurie’s name when they accepted their Oscars, the result of bets they made with the talk show host.

By now, Lurie was actively trying to break into the film business. Did he violate a journalist’s taboo by shopping scripts to studios while reviewing movies? Lurie denies shopping his scripts when he wrote for Los Angeles magazine, but did so during his radio gig.

“I still viewed myself as a reviewer when I was on radio,” he said. “Was it appropriate for me? I think the answer is it’s only inappropriate if I allowed it to affect my film reviewing. I don’t think you will find any studio that said, ‘Yeah, he went easy on us because he was shopping a script.’ ”

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But Lurie’s controversial past didn’t help open doors.

One day in 1996, as he drove to Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills to see if Ralph Fiennes would star in his screenplay “Porkchop,” his partner called saying, “I don’t know what the hell you wrote about their clients, but you cannot walk in those doors.”

Eric Roberts eventually agreed to star, Lurie said, but pulled out a week away from prepping the film. It was a crushing blow to Lurie.

“I was really ready to kill myself,” he recalled. “I got to tell you, it was the lowest period of my life. All my peers knew I was going to make a film, and they were laughing at me. The people in Hollywood were really enjoying it.”

Roberts responds that “Rod was a dream to create with, and I was dying to play ‘Porkchop,’ ” but the reality was that production had been postponed several times and he was offered a chance at the TV movie of “In Cold Blood,” which he felt would enhance his career and pay him a considerable salary. He also notes that “we did not have a completely closed deal, nothing had been signed, though many points had been gone over and agreed upon. . . .

“I was emotionally as committed to Rod’s project as they were, but my life had thrown me a bittersweet curve,” Roberts recalled, adding, “It was heartbreaking for all involved.”

When Lurie’s next project fell through because of insurance problems, a friend suggested that Lurie make a short movie. The result was “4 Second Delay,” which won the special jury prize at the Deauville Film Festival in France in 1998.

Lurie’s first feature-length film, “Deterrence,” starred Pollak and Timothy Hutton in 1999. Pollak played a U.S. president who, snowed in during a campaign stop, takes shelter in a small Colorado diner and learns that Iraq has just invaded Kuwait and slaughtered hundreds of American soldiers. The film received mixed reviews, but Lurie was already onto his next political thriller.

Before “The Contender” went to the Toronto Film Festival, Lurie was warned that he could expect the greatest vindictiveness from his fellow critics.

“So many people told me I was going to be massacred because there was an assumption of pettiness on the part of my peers,” he said. “But when I got there, there were a lot of hugs, a lot of congratulations.”

Now, the man who once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with journalists shouting questions at celebrities and filmmakers from behind the ropes hears his own name being shouted.

Publicist Pat Kingsley, who once called Lurie’s editor into her office and asked why he didn’t fire him, now finds that her memory hazes over when asked to recall what prompted her complaints years back.

“Gosh,” she says, “it was a long time ago and I am having trouble remembering what I had for lunch yesterday.”