Chasing the Bucks

When Barney Rosenzweig got back to L. A. from his European vacation at the end of March 1970, he found the movie business in terrible shape. During the two months he had been away, lazing lavishly with his girlfriend, Jeannine, a delicious little Malibu blonde, from one pleasure center to another, the bottom had fallen out of the economy in general and a policy of tight money was in full squeeze. The major studios, with their huge overheads and age-old concepts of deficit financing, were cutting back drastically on production, the independents were scrambling to find any kind of backing, and the unemployment rolls were swelling. Barney should have been worried. He was out of a job, his personal financial reserves were low and all he had to peddle was the shooting script of a movie called Who Fears the Devil, with which he hoped to establish himself as a successful independent film maker.

But he wasn't worried at all. In fact, he was optimistic. "I knew movies were still being made," he recalls, "and would always be made, and I was confident I'd find the money to make mine. Sure, some of the sources I'd been counting on had dried up, but I still had plenty of places to go and I figured I had a lot of credit piled up where it was supposed to count." Besides, he reasoned, wasn't this a new day in Hollywood? The day of the independent creative artist, who, in the dawning golden age of the low-budget "now" film, would do his own thing, man, and really get it on for love, truth, beauty and, only tangentially, commerce? Everybody was saying it was and coming up with statistics to prove it. About half of the roughly 120 American movies produced the previous year had been turned out by independents and it was estimated that over half of 1970's product would come from the same source. The film audience may, indeed, have shrunk to about 15,000,000 from a high of 80,000,000 in 1946, but it was a new audience--young, liberal, hip and, above all, affluent.

Yes, some studio potboilers, such as Airport and Funny Girl and almost anything turned out by Disney, were still big grossers, but what about all the huge eggs the studios had been laying of late, all those odoriferous disasters such as Star! and Doctor Doolittle? And, in contrast, what about Easy Rider, a movie made mostly on hope and lichee nuts and earning millions? The independents, unencumbered by studio overheads, union featherbedding and old-fashioned ideas, were revolutionizing the industry and grabbing off a bigger and bigger share of the 1.1 billion dollars taken in yearly by the country's 4500 drive-in and 9500 hard-top movie theaters. And now the major studios, too, were reportedly shaping up, proclaiming themselves receptive to new ideas and bright young talents. "It was going to be a great day for the creators," says Barney, "an exciting time for anyone with talent and ideas. The feeling was that, with the studios in big trouble, we were all going to be a lot better off. We'd get to make our films in our own way and without compromising." In other words, not Hollywood anymore but Athens, where every man could be his own auteur.

Still, what about the money? It had to come from somewhere, either from a studio or a producing firm or an investor. The first thing Barney did when he got back from Europe was draw up a budget for Who Fears the Devil. It came to exactly $1,218,895, which made it, by studio standards, a cheapie. "I was quite confident I could make it for considerably less, if necessary," he says, "but that figure included a nice salary for me, $75,000--less money than I'd been making as a TV producer, but I figured this was my first movie and I wouldn't be too demanding." The scripts came out of mimeograph in early April and for Barney it was magic time. He invited some friends over to his Malibu place, read the thing aloud to them and the next day went out after the money. "I decided there was enough of it needed so that I'd go to a major studio. I was very, very confident."

Barney thinks he had every reason to feel confident. After all, he wasn't just some fly-by-night newcomer with nothing going for him but youth and chutzpah; he had an impressive track record. In 1967, at the age of 29, he had taken over a TV series produced by 20th Century-Fox called Daniel Boone, which was then 38th in the ratings, had never had a good review and was $1,700,000 in debt. Three years and 78 hourlong episodes later, the show had risen to remain constantly in the top 20, had acquired more than its share of glowing notices and was no longer in debt. In fact, it was the only nondeficit-financed TV show in the history of Fox. "I was very big there," Barney recalls. "In those three years, I'd handled over $14,000,000 in production costs and Dick Zanuck had let me know that I'd saved them maybe $2,000,000. I had even been given the equivalent of the Fox Medal of Honor, which was a pat on the back and a thank-you-very-much."

Barney had always been popular around the studios. Before taking over Daniel Boone, he had been a press agent and an associate producer on half a dozen features. In ten years in the business, he had worked his way up from $66 a week as an MGM office boy to $1650 as Fess Parker's overseer. "I was very well thought of," he says. "I wasn't pushy and I didn't throw my weight around." This was because he had been brought up in the major-studio era and understood its class system, "about how you deferred to studio heads and got in the backs of cars, things like that." Barney got along well in that atmosphere. He was the only human under 40 at Fox who had ever been invited into the executive steam room. All the more reason to think that when he decided to make his move, checkbooks would flutter open to him. Barney Rosenzweig, Barney reasoned, was one New Wave independent film artist the old wave could trust. He had proved himself within the system and now he had a project of his own, one he believed in totally.

The script of Who Fears the Devil had been written by Melvin Levy, a 69-year-old veteran of the Hollywood wars who looks not unlike Santa Claus and whom Barney describes as a "kind of minor poet and a really lovely old man." Levy had turned out some of the better Daniel Boones and he responded warmly to the material Barney asked him to adapt--a collection of short stories written by Manly Wade Wellman and based on folk tales about a young hillbilly character named John, who travels throughout the land combating evildoers, devils and witches, his only weapon a guitar equipped with genuine silver strings. After a couple of false starts, Levy had turned out what Barney felt was a really superior script. "The character of John, with his silver-strung guitar, who in his odyssey through Appalachia and America's South encounters the occult and mysticism, is authentic American folklore," Barney was to write in a letter to Richard Zanuck at Fox, while also pointing out where the loot was buried: "The marriage of today's music and the big business of witchcraft in one script with a modest budget makes, it seems to me, this hip Wizard of Oz a strong commercial entry."

The first major studio Barney approached was Warner Bros., partly because John Calley, the head of production there, was a friend of his and, more importantly, because Warner's record division had earned $24,000,000 in 1969, with people like Arlo Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot and James Taylor (then still relatively unknown) on its roster of artists. Barney wanted a Guthrie or a Taylor for his leading role and the tie-ins seemed obvious. So, after a telephone conversation, off went the script by messenger to Calley, who promptly turned it over to the literary department and left for Europe a few days later without having read it.

"It was probably unreasonable of me to insist that John Calley, the head of a studio, read the script himself," Barney says. "I'm sure he's besieged with such requests and has hundreds of scripts on his desk. But I was upset. There's an old studio maxim that no reader ever lost his job by saying no to a project; they only get into trouble when they recommend something." Barney wrote to Calley, calling on whatever reserves of credit he might have with him, and begged for two hours of his reading time.

It was two months before Barney heard from Calley. Sometime around the middle of June, he was summoned to Calley's office. "It was really kind of spectacular," Barney recalls. "I mean, you could barely see him across the room, it was so dark in there, with the Tiffany lamp shades and the furs on the floor and draped over the couches and things. It looked like an elegant bordello."

Both men, firmly in touch with their times, had grown beards since they had last seen each other, so the conversation began with a couple of moments on that, after which Calley said, "Barn, hated the script."

"Oh, gee, John, I'm sorry to hear it," Barney answered. "I was hoping that at least you'd be lukewarm, so maybe I could try and do a sales pitch."

"Nope," Calley said. "Supersoft."

"Well, OK," Barney said. "I'm sorry the project got handled the way it did."

"Oh, the literary department loved it," Calley told him, throwing a reader's report across the desk at Barney. "Here, you can have it. They didn't knock you out. I did. I just don't think it works and I don't like it. I think it's a phony and has some bad laughs in it."

The whole interview had taken less than five minutes. Outside, in the parking lot, Barney read the reader's report. "This screenplay is a delight," it began and went on from there, one encomium after another, concluding with a recommendation that it be produced. "In all my years at various studios, I had never read a report on a property this glowing--ever," Barney recalls. "My instinct was to run back into Calley's office and wave it at him and say, 'What is this? How can you do this to me?' "

But he didn't. Instead, he went home and wrote Calley a long letter telling him, among other things, that he was too hip a cat to play Jack Warner, but he never mailed it. "I thought to myself, shit, this picture may never be made and I may need a job someday and he is going to read that and ruin me." Besides, Barney reasoned, Calley's judgment was questionable at best. "As sole producer, he had turned out two movies, The Loved One and Catch-22, that singlehandedly had almost succeeded in grounding two studios, MGM and Paramount." Barney turned elsewhere for his financing.

The rejections from the Hollywood establishment, however, were quick to pile up. Devil was also turned down by Fox, Paramount, Disney, MGM, Columbia, Universal, United Artists, even American International, for God's sake. A typical reaction was that of Peter Bart, an executive at Paramount, who told Barney, "I don't know what the hell you're trying to get at in this script." Dick Zanuck at Fox, where Barney had flourished as a Wunderkind, wrote Barney a polite rejection note. "In these tough and unpredictable times," he intoned, "I would hesitate to gamble on the fact that the story has what it takes to guarantee its success at the box office."

What gamble? Barney asked himself. Here he was, a bright young man with impeccable credentials and bubbling over with talent, and the studio heads apparently regarded him as some kind of wild nut touting an artsy-craftsy sure loser. "All I wanted to make was a successful motion picture," Barney says. "If I could bring it in under budget and get a G rating, they could bail out just on a TV sale. How badly could they get hurt? Where was the downside risk?" It was months before he realized that the studios were playing their old game of follow-that-trend. It was the era of the antihero; every movie had to be Easy Rider, M*A*S*H or Midnight Cowboy. The studios were open to the bold and daring--just as long as it was also the tried and true. "My leading character was a beautiful naïve boy, a Christ symbol," Barney observes, "and musically, we wanted that James Taylor sound. If I had to sell the picture today, I'd tell these guys that what I have is the story of a modern-day American-folk Jesus Christ Superstar." Barney didn't realize it, but he was ahead of his time. He lopped his minimum budget down to $750,000 and began to look elsewhere.

Meanwhile, he was also forced to reconsider his whole life style. He still had his $800-a-month house on the beach, his Jag, the wardrobe from Carroll's in Beverly Hills, a taste for 65-cent cigars and $50 seats to USC football games. And he liked to entertain and to drink good wine. Other than that, he lived very modestly, playing a lot of tennis and usually furnishing the balls. Austerity, however, was leering around the corner. His monthly expenses also included hefty alimony and child-support payments to an ex-wife and now the income had stopped. He had blown a wad in Europe, where he had indulged himself like Genghis Khan, and by midsummer he was down to his last ten grand. He set aside most of it to meet basic obligations to his ex-wife for a year, gave up his house, sold the Jag and moved into a one-room apartment. Then, with his last $2000, he became a charter member of a very rough Monday-night poker game and, as he puts it, "began playing cards very, very well." So, with the luxuries eliminated and the essentials precariously accounted for, he found himself free to maneuver in the new Hollywood.

There are lots of ways to finance a movie, but the most accepted one is a technique known as packaging. The basic theory behind it is simplicity itself: You get yourself a star and a name director, after which you take the so-called package--property, star, director and producer--to where the money is. The trick, of course, is to convince the people you want to include in your package that everyone else is already committed, because the reality is that almost no big-name director or star will commit on his own to a project simply because he likes it. Celebrities, however, do like to cluster together, on the assumption that it keeps them hot, and a bunch of them all wrapped up in the same bundle will almost certainly attract the requisite loot. Most agents these days think exclusively in terms of packaging, because a really big package, one involving two or three stars as well as a name director and a top writer or two, is the only kind of deal that generates the sort of lucre reminiscent, if only faintly, of the old Hollywood. Agents, needless to say, peel their ten percent off the top of the package. (They used to carve off little chunks from elements inside the package as well, until the unions screamed double jeopardy.)

Lee Rosenberg, Barney's agent, a fast talker with a no-nonsense outlook, was definitely committed to a package. Letters and phone calls about Who Fears the Devil, as well as scripts, fanned out to potential packagees, including such establishment figures as Paul Newman and George C. Scott. Almost no one who was "bankable" from the world of folk and rock was overlooked: Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, Arlo Guthrie, Jimmy Dean, John Hartford, Beau Bridges, James Taylor, Chris Jones, Glen Campbell, Ricky Nelson, Bobby Sherman, Johnny Rivers, Tommy Roe and John Phillips. And, of course, the name Peter Fonda, the hottest one in the industry at the time, came up insistently. "If you had Peter Fonda that summer," Barney reminisces, "you had all the money you needed and then some."

Larry Hagman, a friend of Peter's, personally took the script of Devil to the offices of Pando Productions, Fonda's company, and left it there. Two weeks later, Barney, who by this time was well into developing a number of interminable dialogs with secretaries all over the country, called up Pando and explained to the girl who answered the phone exactly who he was and why he was calling. Yes, the girl said, the script was, indeed, there. Was anybody reading it? Barney wanted to know. Well, the girl told him, there was somebody who did come in to read from time to time, but she couldn't really promise anything. All she could tell Barney, really, was that his script was near the top of a large pile on somebody's desk.

Every two weeks for the rest of the summer and well into the fall and winter, Barney talked to the girl at Pando. After the fifth or sixth call, he found out her name was Kathy, and two or three calls after that, she confessed that the script had been misplaced. "That's all right, Kathy," Barney said. "Tell you what, I'll send you another one on the condition that you read it."

"Well, OK," Kathy said, "if you send it to me, the Fox, I'll read it."

It took the Fox six months to read the script, after which she offered a few suggestions on changes but also said she'd do her best to get it to Fonda. And every two weeks, for the following six months, Barney kept calling her, just to make sure she was still doing her best.

Half of Barney's working day was spent on the phone, talking long distance to managers of acts or to their secretaries. He discovered, first of all, that such men as Albert Grossman, who used to manage Bob Dylan, and Mort Lewis, who handles Garfunkel, are very, very rich and their clients are at least five times as rich as they are. What do they need with a movie? Grossman never answered any of Barney's letters or phone calls and his secretary sent back the script of Devil unopened. Once, by accident, Barney got Mort Lewis in person on the phone. "Who? Barney Rosen-what?" he shouted. Barney quickly went into his pitch. "We've got fifty scripts sitting right here," Lewis said. "Fifty at least."

"Does anybody read them?" Barney asked.

"No," said Lewis. "Oh, Art comes in and he reads what and when he wants to, that's all." And that was that.

When he wasn't on the phone, Barney was seeing people and writing letters. Evenings were spent in night clubs and at rock concerts, hunting down talent. One night, at The Troubadour, Barney and Jeannine caught an act called Hedge and Donna. The male end of it, whose full name was Hedge Capers, absolutely knocked Barney out. "He looked just (continued on page 188)Chasing the Bucks(continued from page 120) right for the part of John and he sang great," Barney recalls. "Also, of all the kids I'd seen, he was the only one with old-fashioned stage presence." Furthermore, probably because Hedge hadn't really made it yet, Barney was able to get the script of Devil directly to him. Capers read it, loved it and immediately committed himself to it. The only drawback was his name, which wasn't exactly bankable. He was, however, under contract to Capitol Records and Capitol Records was a bank in itself.

Mike Donohew, director of audio-visual development at Capitol, was a tall, clean-cut, bland-looking young man who came on like an IBM executive, complete with Ivy League suit and attaché case. He seemed, however, to have mastered both the jargon and the milieu of his profession, because he obviously had considerable clout and the conversation in his office had to be conducted over the hard rock being piped in through the walls.

Barney opened by explaining to Donohew that he wanted to star Hedge Capers in his movie and that he needed S1,000,000. "We're not interested," Donohew said. "We don't know anything about movies and we don't want to know anything. For that kind of money we can make thirty albums." Rosenberg got up to go. "But if you want to use Capers," Donohew continued, "we can see some value in that." Rosenberg sat down again.

Barney went into his pitch. He concluded by singling out the recent success of Alice's Restaurant, starring Arlo Guthrie, who had been hitherto unknown to the general public. "We'd like to encourage you to use Hedge Capers," Donohew said.

"How much would it be worth to you to have Capers star in a movie?" Barney asked.

Donohew thought it over. "Thirty to fifty thou," he said.

Rosenberg got up to go again.

"Wait a minute, Lee," Barney said. "The hardest dollar to raise is the first one." He waved Rosenberg back into his chair and turned to Donohew again. He explained that, with a check for something like $50,000 in his hand, he could go to anyone with tangible proof of Capitol's interest in the project. He was also ready to guarantee that the check would not be cashed until the film actually went into production.

"All right," Donohew said, "let us read the script."

"It was beautiful," Barney recalled later. "Here was a guy who, by his own admission, knew nothing about making movies and didn't want to know anything about it, but now, for his lousy fifty Gs, he's a script expert."

Sure enough, a week later, Barney went back to Donohew's office and had to listen to a lecture, delivered over the strains of California Dreamin', about why the script of Who Fears the Devil could not possibly be made into a successful motion picture.

The only really hopeful development to come out of Barney's involvement with packaging and the rock-music scene during this period had come in the form of a two-A.M. phone call from a musician friend who had promised to get a script into the hands of Arlo Guthrie. Guthrie had read the script, the friend said, and loved it. He invited Barney to a party at his house two days later, where he would have a chance to meet Arlo and presumably talk turkey.

Despite his beard, Barney is essentially a square, and he was mildly alarmed by the party itself, which took place in a secluded hacienda high in the Hollywood hills. Weird people dressed in funny-looking clothes and smoking funny-looking things were sprawled all over. Barney, equipped with a glass of wine from which he hardly dared sip, was led into a room where Arlo and his crowd were shooting pool. The introduction was appropriately casual: "Hey, Arlo, this is Barn. Barn, that's Arlo."

It was about ten minutes before Arlo spoke. He was lining up a shot when he suddenly looked up over his pool cue at Barney, who was standing at the end of the table across from him, and said, "That's a heavy script." Click went the ball toward the corner pocket. A few minutes later, over another shot, Arlo looked up again. "I really liked that script."

"Terrific!" Barney said. "I'd like to talk to you about it."

They finally got to it an hour or so later, when some food was served. Barney, with a plate of something in his lap, descended to the floor where everyone else was, and maneuvered himself next to Arlo. "I'm really glad you liked the script," he said. "Is there anything you want changed?"

"No, man, don't change anything," Arlo said. "It's a great script!"

"How'd you happen to read it?" Barney asked.

"I'm interested in what people think of me," Arlo explained. "I can tell what people think of me by the kind of things they send me to read. You dig?"

Barney dug. He told Arlo he'd like to make a deal, but it turned out that Arlo had another movie to make first. Barney found out it wasn't scheduled till the following June; it was then only late August. "We have plenty of time," he said, visions of sugarplum packages dancing in his head. But Arlo had an album to cut that would take him through September. "We can shoot in October and November," Barney said.

"Well, that's when I gotta go back to my farm, because I gotta build my barn," Arlo said.

"You gotta build your barn?"

"Well, yeah--I gotta build the barn before the winter sets in or the animals'll get cold," Arlo explained.

Barney could tell by the way Guthrie spoke that it would have been useless to suggest that he'd gladly hire a man to build the goddamn barn for him. "Also," Barney remembers, "there was no eye contact, no enthusiasm, no communication with this guy. It was like talking to Marlon Brando, who is never an easy guy to talk to. But from Marlon Brando you put up with it, because--well, because it's Marlon Brando. But Arlo Guthrie?"

Nevertheless, like a pro, Barney played the string out. He called Guthrie the next morning at his hotel and was told he'd have to talk to Guthrie's manager, Harold Leventhal, in New York. That conversation, held a couple of weeks later, was short but not too sweet. "Arlo talked to me about this picture you want to make," Leventhal began and let Barney get a couple of sentences out before he added, "Yeah, well, I was coproducer on Alice's Restaurant."

Oh, Barney figured, he wants in for his. "I'm sure we can work something out," Barney said.

"I haven't read the script yet. My secretary's read it," Leventhal said. "She didn't like it very much."

"I'm really not into discussing this project with your secretary," Barney answered. "The point is, your client likes it. I like your client and I'd like to make a movie with him."

"You know, Arlo's not really an actor," Leventhal said.

"I've seen him twice in Alice's Restaurant and I think he can do it," Barney said.

Leventhal then asked who was directing the picture and Barney told him he had several very good people in mind whose names would not necessarily mean very much to him, though they were well known and respected in the industry. "My own personal choice would be John Newland, who worked for me on Daniel Boone and has a couple of feature films to his credit," said Barney.

"You're right," Leventhal said, "the name doesn't mean very much to me." But he did promise to get in touch with Barney by October 12, then about four weeks away.

October 12, of course, came and went without any further word from Leventhal.

From the relatively glamorous world of the big-name package and the rock-music star, Barney's descent through the Dantean substrata of the new-Hollywood picture business proved to be grotesque and occasionally painful. Particularly obnoxious to Barney was the take-a-producer-to-lunch bunch, an agglomeration of types, some of them with legitimate amounts of investable capital, who had no intention of getting into any aspect of show business but who got their kicks from feeding the near famous. "Oh, all you need is seven hundred and fifty thousand? No problems, I've got guys waiting in line," the voices would bark into Barney's ear. They'd all want to read the script, of course (Barney estimates that his mimeographing costs must have topped those for Gone with the Wind), after which they'd invite Barney to lunch. It would be a good lunch in one of Hollywood's posher eateries, after which Barney would wait for the confirming phone call that never came. He developed a clear picture in his head of what the bunch got out of this procedure. "Hey, remember the Daniel Boone show?" he'd imagine them saying to the wife and kids at dinner that night. "I had lunch with the producer of it today. He wants me to invest in some schmucky movie he's going to make, but I'm not going to do it."

One of the low points was the lunch held in the offices of an outfit called Motion Associates, which occupied a small two-story building on the Strip. The hosts were Murray Roman, a disc jockey avowedly anxious to make the leap into film production, and his associate Cliff Bole, an aggressive young man who had once worked for Barney as a glorified go-fer on Daniel Boone. "It's a dynamite script," Bole had told Barney over the phone, making it clear that a deal was definitely in the offing; they'd straighten out all the details over lunch.

Barney showed up with Mel Levy, who had made the initial contact with Roman, and his lawyer, Sam Perlmutter, a slight, stringy-haired live wire with a sensitive nose for strange odors. They entered to find themselves faced by a cute little spiral staircase leading up to a loft; to their right, a magnificent antique pool table basked under a huge Tiffany lamp shade. "It's a front," Sam said right away. "We're in trouble."

The lunch itself took nearly three hours and Roman did most of the talking, which, after all, is what disc jockeys do. Barney gleaned two impressions from all the talk. One was that Roman wanted to direct the picture, the second that he was less interested in financing it than in buying into Barney's rights. When at last Barney, Sam and Mel descended the spiral staircase and emerged into the sunshine, Barney said, "Sam, did you get the feeling that that was ninety percent bullshit?"

"Ninety-five percent," said Sam.

Later that day, Roman called Levy and told him he thought Barney and Sam would be difficult to deal with. "Can we get rid of them?" he asked.

As the months passed and Barney's options shrank, so did the budget. He chopped it down to just under $500,000 in an effort to score somewhere. He also changed the title. As The Defy, the script made some of the old rounds, bouncing back, sometimes with irritated little notes from readers who had been there before. But Barney was ready to try anything and everyone. He even sent the script off to his ex-father-in-law in Hawaii, H. M. Lang, who, Barney assured him, had "always been one of my favorite millionaires." There was no answer. And meanwhile, Barney continued to play cards on Monday nights with ferocious concentration.

A regular and consistent loser in the poker game was a neighbor of Barney's in Malibu whom we'll call Babe Snyder. Babe was bright, young, unattached, uncommitted to anything and the sole heir to a very large food-packing fortune. He and Barney drove to and from the game together in Babe's silver-gray Rolls. Barney, who saw in Babe a true lost soul, urged him one night to get into the picture business. When Babe displayed some interest, Barney told him that if he'd help him finance The Defy, Babe, as an associate producer of Barney's "working right beside me for a year," could learn everything he'd ever have to know about producing a movie. Babe continued to seem interested and every Monday night for nearly a year, Barney continued to work on him.

Then finally, one day, Babe called. "Barney," he said, "I've been thinking over what you've been telling me and I think you're right. I am going to get into the picture business."

"Great!" said Barney.

"I've just written a script and I'm going to make my own movie," Babe said.

Miles L. Rubin, chairman of the board of Pioneer Systems, Inc., moved a lot more swiftly and decisively than Babe Snyder. Rubin is a self-made man with fingers firmly planted in a number of succulent pies. The rumor is that he has Indonesia locked up, which isn't bad, considering that most American free-enterprisers would happily settle for a borough or a small county. Rubin is young, personable, a generous host and unsentimental in business. He had never even considered Barney's project, because once, some years before, he had been slightly singed in a movie deal and the experience had slammed shut a door in his head. But now, one day in the early spring of 1971, after a little tennis with Barney on his own court in Malibu, he suddenly asked him how things were going. Barney filled him in. "How much money do you need?" Miles asked. Barney told him. "Why do you need that much?"

Barney began to break the budget down for Miles, but every time he mentioned a salary, a fee or an advance, Miles wanted to know if that payment couldn't be deferred. "If the picture isn't made," he explained, "none of these guys get anything. I want to know what the picture costs in terms of film, equipment, all that. These other guys can wait." Barney told him about $200,000 but added that it wasn't a good way to make a picture, because some deferred costs came to more in the end and, besides, people worked better if they were getting paid. "That's all right, we can overcome all those problems," Rubin said. "I think that's the way to do it."

"What are you saying to me, Miles?" Barney asked. "Are you going to write me a check?"

"I just might."

"Miles, don't jerk me off," Barney said. "We're neighbors, we play tennis together and I've been through a lot this year. I'm very vulnerable."

Rubin assured Barney he was serious and Barney asked him for six weeks to think it over. "I've got two or three other irons in the fire," he said. "And I'd rather make the picture my way."

"Why?"

"For the reasons I just told you," Barney said. "And number two, quite frankly, because it enables me to bail out a little bit financially. It gives me some front money."

"Aha!" exclaimed Rubin. "You picture guys are all alike! You go around crying about starving for your art, but when somebody comes along willing to finance your picture, you're just trying to get some money out of him. Barney, you've got to face a fact of life. Either you're an entrepreneur or you're a salaried guy all your life."

That one hit home. "OK, Miles," Barney said, "you've got a deal."

"Give me a copy of your budget," Miles said, "and I'll get back to you in a few days."

Actually, he left on an extended business trip and it was about a month before Miles got back to Barney. When he did, it was to tell him that the deal was almost certainly going to be made, provided Barney would agree to take on a black man as a partner. Barney had no objection whatsoever to taking on a black partner, until he discovered that what Miles meant was that Barney would have to vanish into the background to allow his black partner to figure as the sole producer of the picture. That way Miles felt that, working through the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, he might be able to get some help from the Federal Government in financing the project.

It took Barney a full four seconds to decide. "Miles, I know this doesn't make much sense to you as a businessman," he said. "I know you have parachute factories and your name isn't on any of the parachutes, nor is it important to you that it should be. But this is my movie, Miles. This picture may never be done, but it'll always be my picture. And I'd rather it would never be made than give it away to someone else. And if you're really interested in helping the Negro, you don't do it by going down to Watts and waving a magic wand over somebody and certifying the guy a producer by virtue of somebody else's sweat. If you really want to help them, help them make their own movies."

Which is exactly what Miles Rubin did, because he is fundamentally a decent and a liberal man. He wound up financing Yaphet Kotto's first film, a black motorcycle epic. But, of course, that didn't help Barney any.

By the early summer of 1971, he had begun to think that maybe the yellow-brick road was leading nowhere--a feeling shared by an increasing number of his friends. But Barney is a hardhead and not used to losing. Besides, there had been one mildly hopeful development. Somewhere along the way that spring, he had wandered into the Hollywood office of a Chicago firm called Mercantile Financial Corporation and submitted his script to the person manning the premises, George Sidney, an old-Hollywood dinosaur who had once directed tons of MGM musicals. Sidney liked the script and recommended to his home office that it finance the picture up to $600,000. The only trouble with the arrangement was that Mercantile didn't really finance movies; what it did was provide "interim production financing," a fancy way of saying that it would lend you the money--provided you could get somebody else to guarantee it by putting up a completion bond as well as "a firm and unconditional agreement" to buy the loan plus interest either 18 months after theatrical release or 30 months from the first day of shooting, whichever came first. The basic interest charged was high-14 percent per annum--and all sorts of other odd little gouges tended to waft it upward. It wasn't a good deal. "Mostly bullshit," says Barney, but it did enable him to go back with something fiscally negotiable in hand to a lot of people who had already said no.

What Barney hadn't realized, as he continued his impossible quest, was the extent of the attrition on his judgment and his pride. They had been nibbled away until there was very little left of either. Otherwise, how to account for the major fiascoes of those last few months? The first came in the form of a pudgy young stud in a $300 suit whom Barney and Jeannine met at a party and who talked nonstop about money. He had three names, Norman Kent Storms, and he had just bought a house for $350,000 in the exclusive Malibu Colony. He also told everyone within hearing that he and he alone had been entrusted with investing the $440,000,000 Howard Hughes had realized from the sale of his TWA stock. Furthermore, for tax reasons, the money had to be invested soon.

Later, in a secluded nook, Jeannine got the whole story out of Storms. It read like a pulp romance. Just after World War Two, it went, an 11-year-old waif ran away from his foster home and took shelter from the rain in an archway somewhere in Santa Monica. He was awakened by a burly bodyguard type who led him into the presence of a strange man wearing tennis shoes. For the next 25 years, young Kent hardly ever left Howard's side. Until very recently, in fact, he had been living on top of the Desert Inn in Vegas, right next to Jean Peters and just down the hall from Howard himself. He had grown up a shy, naïve boy in many ways, but not so innocent that he hadn't been able to make a small fortune for himself by guiding Howard's investments and tagging along with a little money of his own. He could triple anybody's money in six weeks, he said, and added significantly that Howard was anxious for him to get married. "What are you waiting for, baby?" Barney said to Jeannine at once. "You want me to wrap you in cellophane?"

Well, she and Barney had a good laugh over that one. What they did do was get the script of The Defy right over to Norman Kent Storms and soon the word came back. It was favorable and the consummation of the deal would be celebrated a few days later at a dinner party one of Barney's friends was throwing for him in the Malibu Colony. The party was a gay affair, but Norman Kent Storms was late getting to it. When he hadn't shown up by nine o'clock, Barney called the Colony gate and got Bruce, one of the private guards, on the phone. "Bruce, do you know Mr. Storms?" he asked.

Bruce chuckled. "Oh, yeah, I know Mr. Storms, all right."

"Bruce, that's a very strange reading," Barney said. "Have you seen him today?"

"Not since this afternoon," said Bruce, "when the FBI and the Santa Monica police were here arresting him."

Even then, Barney clung to his belief in Norman Kent Storms. Feeling sure that there had been some terrible misunderstanding, he telephoned Sam, his lawyer, and set him to tracking down the whereabouts of his financier. A couple of hours later, Sam called back. "Hey, do you have a bumika, " he said. "He's in for grand theft auto and for cashing a bum check." Mr. Storms, it developed, had only recently emerged from a long holiday in San Quentin. His only regret, as expressed to Sam through a grille at the county jail, was that he hadn't had enough time; six months and he'd have put together some very legitimate deals for all those nice rich people out there. He had been done in, apparently, by bouncing a $14 check off a local gas station. So are the mighty fallen.

Equally implausible--but even more humiliating--was Barney's involvement with a group of independent hustlers dug up by Sam's process server, a 21-year-old kid named Pete Hunter whom Sam paid five and ten dollars a shot to hand people unwelcome papers. Pete had dug them up somewhere, perhaps while spraying subpoenas around the city. When Sam heard about it, he again tried to dissuade Barney from attending a meeting Pete had arranged. "Pete's a nice kid, but he doesn't know anything," Sam said. "He knows streets." But Barney would not be put off. He went to the meeting without Sam, who had a date in court, and all he remembers clearly about it is that one man with a badly shaved chin did all the talking while a second one, a gorilla in a blue-serge suit, sat wordless in the background, his chair tilted against the wall.

When Barney sat down to figure the deal out later with Sam, they concluded that they had been left with seven and a half percent of the movie. "Shit, OK. We'll do it!" Barney said.

"That's when I saw him totally eat his pride," Sam recalls. "I saw him eat it in chunks. All because the animal in him had to make that movie." Only by threatening to walk out on Barney was he able to stall the deal.

Barney's great emotional release was the Monday-night poker game and he took a savage delight in beating his friends out of sizable pots, a pleasure quite divorced from the economic necessity of winning. After he'd administered a particularly vicious sandbagging to the group one night one of the players said, "Jesus, Barney, I wish you'd go back to work, so some of the rest of us could win a pot once in a while."

"If you sons of bitches would finance my picture, I'd leave you alone," Barney snarled back.

There was an uncomfortable silence, then someone said, "Barney, don't you know we really want you to make your picture?"

The speaker was Tony Hope, the affable son of Bob Hope, certainly one of the richest men in America. Tony, a Harvard lawyer and Southern California businessman, had been an executive at 20th Century-Fox and had made feature motion pictures in Australia. He had spent the past year and a half dabbling in real estate while looking around for something else to do. Despite his father's wealth, Tony didn't have enough money in his own right to risk backing Barney's movie the first time around; but now, when Barney came back to him with a slashed budget, he showed some interest. But he didn't commit himself, and more time passed.

Barney remembers the worst morning of all as the one in mid-July when he came across an ad in The Hollywood Reporter for a "dynamic person" who would move to Atlanta, Georgia, to "speak to large groups" as well as "direct/ act in commercial films," starting pay S300 a week. "It was the worst morning because I intended to answer that ad," Barney says. "And then Tony called the same day to tell me that if I could get a couple of other costs deferred, he'd back the movie himself. It was a gutsy thing to do, because it meant putting about half his net worth on the line."

Who Fears the Devil alias The Defy alias My Name Is John alias Who Fears the Devil again (they settled at last on the original title) finally went into production in early October of 1971. It was shot in six weeks on location near Asheville, North Carolina, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Barney got the director he wanted, John Newland, and the cast, composed mostly of such top Hollywood character actors as Denver Pyle, Susan Strasberg, Bill Traylor, Harris Yulin, Alfred Ryder and a young unknown named Sharon Henesy. He even got Hedge Capers to play John, but not before he had reopened a dialog with Harold Leventhal, Arlo Guthrie's manager, in New York.

Leventhal, once he'd been informed that the film was actually going into production, had revealed that his client might be available, after all. Barney took Tony Hope to a screening of Alice's Restaurant. Halfway through it, Tony turned to Barney and said, "I think he's awful." The decision was made to go with Capers.

But Barney gave himself the pleasure of telephoning the news to Harold Leventhal personally. "Harold," he said, "I just want you to know that my partner agrees with what you said a year ago."

"Oh, really? What's that?" Leventhal asked.

"Your client can't act."

So there were one or two pleasurable moments along the bumpy road to the Emerald City, but not many. Looking back on the ordeal as he got ready to go off and make his movie, Barney, his lips once more clamped around a 65-cent cigar, had this to say: "Kicking the old Hollywood is like kicking George Wallace. It's easy. The people I had to deal with over the past year are worse than the old-Hollywood moguls. They have all the weaknesses of an old-fashioned major-studio attitude and none of the studio's strengths. At least when you talked to someone at a major studio in the old days, you were talking the same language. And it was a nice environment, especially if you were on top. Well, maybe something will come along to revive the major studios. They were always saved in the past and at the last minute, like the cavalry coming over the hill. They were saved by sound, by color, by the wide screen, sometimes by a particular movie--Ben-Hur did it for MGM, The Sound of Music for Fox. That may happen again, with something like cable TV. I certainly hope so. Meanwhile, I haven't got a worry in the world--except the constant, gnawing fear that the film will get made and wind up on the second half of some lousy double bill in multiples, where it could sink like a stone."

But that, as they say, is showbiz.