Angling for the A-list

By PATRICK GOLDSTEIN

March 8, 2005 12 AM PT

The way Avi Lerner makes movies, there is no room for a wasted hour of daylight or an extra cushion in the star’s trailer. Maybe that’s why Lerner’s low-budget Nu Image film company has made 40 films in the past six years at his studio in Bulgaria, though calling it a studio is something of a stretch. When I asked how many soundstages it had, he laughed. “We don’t need soundstages. It’s so quiet in Bulgaria you can just shoot in a warehouse. As long as there’s no train or highway next to you, it’s no problem.”

Born in Haifa, an ex-Israeli paratrooper who fought in the 1967 Six-Day War, Lerner runs his company with Israeli military efficiency. If he wants to see what’s going on in post-production of any of his movies -- he’s making 18 this year alone -- he can wander down the hall of his Nu Image headquarters in the Mid-Wilshire district to eight editing bays where the movies are being cut together. His partner Danny Dimbort’s office is filled with posters adorned with star billings and ad lines (“The notorious True Crime that shocked a nation!”). The films were unknown to me, perhaps because they hadn’t even started shooting, an illustration of Lerner’s fundamental business plan: “First we sell the picture and then we make it.”

An affable man who moved to America in 1992, Lerner has little patience for anyone, even a star, who threatens this smooth-running assembly line, which is perhaps why when I visited his office the other day, I found him in the midst of a high-decibel tiff with the agents representing Steven Seagal, who’s already made five films with Lerner. Due to shoot a new thriller in South Africa, Seagal had been, according to Lerner, wreaking havoc on the schedule by rewriting the script. “Help me with this crazy man!” Lerner bellows over the phone in his thick Israeli accent. “If you can’t control this man and make him obey his contract, then I don’t want to talk to you! You don’t understand -- I can’t eat! I can’t sleep!”

After Lerner careened off down the hall, I studied a wall of photos in his office. It’s crowded with pictures of Lerner -- a rangy 57-year-old with a puffy cloud of silver hair, the same color as his Mercedes -- with a variety of B-movie stars, including Jean-Claude Van Damme, Patrick Swayze, Stephen Baldwin, Ray Liotta and Dolph Lundgren. Until now, that’s been his business, making low-budget action thrillers financed by foreign sales (260 in the past two decades by his count) that, with few exceptions, make their debut at your local video store.

But that’s all about to change.

Lerner is quietly in the process of making a string of bigger-budget films, populated with A-list movie stars, that will either turn him into the next hot film financier or send him back to the video stores licking his wounds.

Over the next five months, he is starting production on movies with such major stars as Bruce Willis, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta, as well as two recent Oscar winners, Morgan Freeman (who’s teamed in a film with John Cusack) and Hilary Swank, who’s costarring with Scarlett Johansson and Josh Hartnett in “The Black Dahlia,” which starts shooting in a few weeks in Bulgaria, with Brian De Palma directing.

These new big-star vehicles, which are being made under Lerner’s upscale Millennium Pictures banner, won’t come cheap. He says “The Black Dahlia” will cost $68 million. “16 Blocks,” the Willis thriller, is budgeted at $52 million, and the Cage movie, a remake of the 1973 thriller “The Wicker Man,” costs $40 million. Most of the films are being bankrolled through deals Lerner has made with Equity Pictures and VIP, two of the biggest German film investment funds that, along with other similar funds, provide financing for many independent producers like Lerner.

The idea that this brash Israeli is suddenly in the Bruce Willis business is a fascinating commentary on the power of available money in Hollywood. Until now, Lerner hasn’t just been an outsider -- he’s been off the radar screen. No one invited him to their Oscar parties. He’s never met moguls like Alan Horn or Peter Chernin -- he says he knows Brad Grey only because he sits near him at Lakers games. But the movie business is like nature -- it abhors a vacuum. With MGM and Miramax winding down and other studios cutting back on production, everyone is looking for someone new to bankroll films for the booming international market.

Known in low-budget circles as a straight shooter, Lerner has been a good bet for his bankers. Of his 260 films, only five have lost money, those being occasional art-house labors of love. But for his new crop of pictures to be successful, he’ll need to deliver enough sizzle to persuade a major studio to fund a U.S. theatrical release. (Until recently, he had a distribution deal with Miramax that culminated in one modest hit, “Undisputed,” and a number of films, notably “Prozac Nation,” that were never released theatrically.) Lerner knows all too well that virtually every previous low-budget company that tried to step up to the big leagues has crashed and burned.

“They all did what we try to avoid -- they tried to compete with the studios,” he says. “The difference between me and the others is that between our German tax deals and foreign sales, I can recoup the money for the budget even if, God forbid, the movies go straight to video. But do I worry? From my heart, I’m worried. Can I succeed where everyone else has failed? I worry about that all the time.”

Lerner’s big challenge is quality control. He is the first to admit that he’s made many films “where if I saw it on TV, I’d reach for the clicker.” The Lerner modus operandi -- creating the poster before making the movie -- comes into sharper focus when you realize that despite his hands-on approach to many facets of filmmaking, he doesn’t actually read scripts. “My language is Hebrew,” he says, “and if you read a script in English you have to understand a lot of subtleties and different meanings. So I just don’t trust myself to know if a script is really good or not.”

Lerner relies on the judgment of several people at his company, notably writer-producer Boaz Davidson. He also has a multi-picture deal with production team Randall Emmett and George Furla, who brought him many of his current projects. Even though the odds of success for Lerner are slim, it’s hard to bet against someone whose energies are so relentlessly focused on his audience. In many ways, he’s a throwback to the immigrant entrepreneurs who started the movie business a century ago. His strength is gut instinct, not sophistication. Or as he put it, apropos of one of his most successful B-pictures, “I’m very proud to be involved with ‘Shark Attack.’ ”

In fact, Lerner isn’t giving up his old business. He’s still doing a full slate of low-budget video titles, including “Zombies,” “Alien vs. Alien” and “The Tenants,” which will surely be the only Bernard Malamud adaptation to ever costar Snoop Dogg. He’s also doing “Rambo 4” with Sylvester Stallone, who according to Lerner is “one of the smartest guys I know.” Having persuaded Stallone to costar with a younger actor, Lerner is confident. “It’s a franchise,” he says. “If No. 4 works, then you have a No. 5.”

What Lerner worries about the most is keeping costs to a minimum, which is why he prefers Bulgaria to the U.S. for making films. “You name a country, I’ve shot a movie there,” he says, rattling off a string of locales, including South Africa, Israel, Brazil, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and the Czech Republic. His one concession to star power is on the Travolta film, which could’ve been made far more economically in Bulgaria, but will film in Florida, near the star’s home.

“The Black Dahlia” script is set in 1946 Los Angeles, but Lerner says that by shooting it in Sofia he will save up to 80% of what it would cost to film in L.A. “A good carpenter in L.A. costs $2,000 a week, but a carpenter in Bulgaria costs maybe $250 a week,” he says. “Since a normal salary in Bulgaria is $150 a week, we’re paying them more money than they could normally earn, so I’m helping their economy and saving us money.”

It is futile to point out that the jobs he creates in Bulgaria come at the expense of jobs in America. Lerner sees himself as an underdog who has to create his opportunities wherever he can find them. If the studios, which have far more money, take productions overseas, why shouldn’t he? Having fought in four wars, by his count, he is not given to sentiment. He was in Tel Aviv recently, on the phone, selling his Willis action movie, when a suicide bomber set off a huge explosion down the street, killing four people and injuring 50. He never got off the phone. Within 30 minutes, Lerner says, everything was seemingly back to normal. “They took everyone to the hospital, cleaned up the site and people went on with their lives. In Israel, people may lose their brothers or sons, but you carry on.”

Still, Lerner admits he found the experience unsettling. “There I am negotiating to make this nonstop Bruce Willis film, full of bombs and explosions, and 200 yards in front of me is the real thing. I tell you, how strange is this world?”

The Big Picture appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Comments and suggestions can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein @latimes.com.