Back In The Ring - Review

Jon Peters, the secret force behind this season's hottest movie, was once dismissed as a washed-up '80s dinosaur. But Ali may prove that the Hollywood-hairdresser-turned-Kabbalah-spouting-producer is still a contender.

THIS SEASON'S MOST ANTICIpated movie was born in a quintessential Jon Peters moment. Seven years ago a dozen or so Columbia Pictures executives, producers, lawyers, agents, and Muhammad Ali himself trudged to a bungalow at the Hotel Bel-Air to hear yet another pitch about an Ali movie. Their host was Peters, the onetime Beverly Hills hairdresser, ex-boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, and producer of bits like Rain Man and Batman. But at the time Peters was relatively down and out: He had just been fired after a disastrous and sybaritic 19 months as the cochairman of Sony Pictures, and his mansion had burned down, resulting in a year-long residency at the BelAir at his insurance company's expense.

Putting together a deal for Ali was Peters's gambit to show he wasn't all washed up. As the meeting began Ali, hands trembling, pulled from his briefcase a battered copy of the Koran and clutched it to his chest. Not to be outdone, Peters grabbed a photograph of Streisand and clutched it to his chest. By the time the meeting was over, Ali had signed on. It was a deal sealed over the sacred and the profane, and for the much maligned Peters, a measure of vindication.

Given that Ali is debuting on December 7 and is already generating buzz that it is a surefire Oscar nominee, you would think Peters's accomplishments would be on the lips of everyone in Hollywood. But instead Peters's role in bringing Ali to the screen has been largely erased from the town's historical record. Ali's director, Michael Mann, and star, Will Smith, are poised to claim the glory.

Even though he's credited as producer on what may become the most lauded drama of the year, Peters's career still seems stone cold. "The dirt has settled on his grave. He's too crazy," declares one agent at Endeavor, who scratches through his 6,500-name Rolodex and finds he doesn't even have Peters's number. Though a spokesman for Warner Bros. insists, "Jon is still a good friend of the studio," his production deal there was severed last March. Sony maintains a stony silence when asked about Peters's involvement with Ali.

The era of the omnipotent, swashbuckling producer is over. Of course, Peters isn't the only casualty of the trend. His former partner Peter Guber has a low-profile deal at Paramount. Don Simpson is dead. Scott Rudin. Jerry Bruckheimer, and Joel Silver avoid headlines and make their movies quietly Meanwhile, top-drawer directors like Mann, Ridley Scott, and Steven Spielberg, and stars like Smith, Tom Cruise, and Drew Barrymore are essentially producing their own projects. Producers now defer to the star, the director, and the studio that's paying the bills--which leaves little room for the legendary madness of the breed. Peters's antics in his heyday were particularly notorious: He once jumped onto the desk of Warners chairman Bob Daly to make a point and, when he was cochairman of Sony, he harangued his Japanese boss all the way to the bathroom.

In a town obsessed with status, the 56-year-old Peters claims not to mind his new anonymity. For the past few years he has remained holed up in his office in a secluded hilltop estate a mile above Sunset Boulevard. Peters says he bought the place to avoid what rabbis call the "evil eye": the envious stare of those who covet what he has.

He has been listening to rabbis a lot lately, though the former wunderkind is a gentile in a famously Jewish industry Peters says he became a devotee of the Kabbalah Centre and its charismatic leader, Eitan Yardeni, after sitting in on a few meetings three years ago. Kabbalah is an international movement that preaches a kind of mystical Judaism tempered with a heady dose of New Age psychospiritual precepts. In a testament to his new faith, Peters wears a piece of red string on his left wrist--a reminder to restrain the "hand of taking." The string is an increasingly common Hollywood talisman. "Madonna--when you see her concert, look on her left hand. You'll see a red string," says Peters, who recently huddled with the singer to discuss his plans to build a Kabbalah ranch for troubled teens. Peters knows from juvenile delinquency He was expelled from a San Fernando Valley junior high school for disciplinary reasons--including raking his mother's car for a joyride--and at 13 was put into a youth detention camp . "We can bring kids in and work with them by saying: Restrict. Be proactive, not reactive. Don't fight," he says.

Peters dates his spiritual awakening to 1998, when he was filming Wild Wild West and suddenly found himself enveloped by "darkness." By his own account he made an enormous amount of money investing in real estate and other ventures, including biotech companies, but he gradually realized he had become lost in "a very selfish place" and was just going through the motions of making films. "My heart wasn't in it," he says. "I never went to the set." He briefly thought about retiring from the movie business, but then, swept up in Hollywood's latest mania, he turned to Kabbalah.

Lounging in his vast garden in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, Peters, plumper now than in his youth, still has perfect hair in an '80s sort of way, showing just a little salt and pepper around the temples. The famously short-fused producer says he agreed to speak after weeks of unreturned calls and broken appointments only to make it clear that he's a different man now. "I was just very angry.... If somebody got angry at me I'd jump on a table and jerk them out of their chair," he says of the behavior that got films like A Star Is Born and The Witches of Eastwick onto the screen. Now, says Peters, he's learning to "restrict." In the mystic argot of Kabbalah this means doing less, reflecting more, and discovering, as Peters puts it, "how not to be scary to people."

It's a remarkable turnaround for a guy who once struck a marketing executive for daring to voice an opinion, and more than a few of his old sparring partners will probably remain unconvinced. Peters has producer credits on some 40 movies and claims to have been instrumental in making at least 40 more. Married at 16, divorced at 21, he became a hairdresser because he figured it was a good way to meet women. It was. By 1973 he had his own salon on Rodeo Drive and styled, and then courted, Lesley Ann Warren (they married and divorced) and later Streisand, who starred in his first movie--the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born. "I think I did it out of complete panic," Peters says now of the drive that propelled him.

In 1980 he began his roller-coaster relationship with Guber. The duo thrived on the credo of big dreams, big stars, big spending. After the success of Batman Peters and Guber sold their production company to Sony for $200 million and took over management of the big studio formed when Sony bought Columbia Pictures in 1989. Less than two years later Guber and Sony dumped Peters, banishing him with a deal that promised $1 million per picture, fat overhead, and 100 hours per year in charter jet rental fees--all conditional on his primary office being anywhere besides their Culver City studio. (Guber was himself fired shortly thereafter.)

Still, Sony owes its great Christmas 2001 hope to a man it has been trying to ignore for years. Since 1991 Peters has developed at least 32 projects for Sony; only one, Money Train, was allowed to become a movie. Yet Peters and his people, at their piratical best, virtually stole Ali for Columbia. Back in 1993 Paul Ardaji--an East Coast ad executive who had optioned the rights to Ali's life story--was deep in negotiations with Scott Rudin and Paramount when Peters excitedly entered the fray. "Jon is a big boxing fan," explains Adam Fields, then president of Peters Entertainment, considerably understating the case. Peters had been a boxer in reform school and later a devotee of wrestling, kick-boxing, and jujitsu. In meetings with studio executives he bragged about his boxing prowess, complete with a tally of his knockouts.

Understandably, the Ali project got his attention. "You've got to call Mark Canton," Peters told Fields. Unfortunately that meant waking the Columbia chief--a close friend of Peters's--in Venice, where The Age of Innocence was being shown.

"I know all about Ardaji," snapped a groggy Canton. "We've talked with him. You can't make a deal with the guy." After hanging up, however, Fields remembered that Columbia had made a lackluster Ali biography, The Greatest, in 1977--and no studio makes a movie without keeping sequel or remake rights.

"Call Canton," Peters told Fields a second time, after hearing about The Greatest. Again Canton irritably informed Fields that if the studio held the rights to Ali's life story, he would certainly know about it. Peters, undeterred, checked with Columbia's business affairs lawyers, who said the records were in storage. Fields took a crew through the Burbank warehouse one weekend and found the original contracts, which covered portions of Ali's life; soon afterward he hired a detective to track down the British producer who co-owned the rights, and snapped them up. Columbia's undisputed ownership of The Greatest allowed the studio's attorneys to undermine Paramount's negotiations by threatening legal warfare. In the end Ardaji hammered out a deal with Peters and company instead.

"If the question is 'Could this film have been made without Jon?' the answer is no, this film could not have been made without Jon," says Stephen Rivele, the screenwriter who, with partner Christopher Wilkinson, was hired in 1998 to write a draft of Ali's screenplay. According to Rivele, Peters played a major role in shaping their product. He kept asking about the last and next-to-last scenes. "How are you going to end on a high? You want people to walk out on a high," he kept telling them.

Next the producer courted Smith relentlessly for the title role; Peters says that Smith was "scared to death" of playing Ali. According to Rivele, Peters was instrumental in helping the actor rise to the boxer's "consciousness." By the time Peters got through with him, Smith declared, a la Ali, "I'm the only person in the world who can do this."

Working through a list of possible directors that included Barry Sonnenfeld, Curtis Hanson, and Spike Lee, Columbia finally landed Mann in early 2000. But as soon as he was hired the director dumped Rivele and Wilkinson--without telling them--and began his own revision with Eric Roth, his collaborator on The Insider. Mann's involvement put an effective end to Peters's role in Ali.

"Mann took control," Peters admits. "He was very up-front. He said, 'Look, I want to be clear. I'd love to do the movie. But I want you to know that it's the Michael Mann way.' "The old Peters would have either dumped him on the spot, worn him to a nub with argument, or maybe even hit him; the new one dealt with it Kabbalah-style: "I really try, even in the Michael Mann situation--which meant turning over something that was my passion--to say, 'Okay, you make the movie. And how can I serve you?'" Peters still shares in an unusual arrangement under which he, Smith, and Mann are responsible for any spending on the film above its $105 million budget. But all the expected glory will go to Mann and Smith.

Many see this as karmic justice. To a large extent Peters brought his professional loneliness upon himself. He spent much of the 1990s in a thicket of litigation--with employees, insurance companies, and neighbors--including one suit against an electrician who greeted him outside the 1998 Academy Awards with a sign claiming Peters owed him $22,453.1 And during his last tenure at Warner Bros., from 1994 to 2001, he managed to produce only four films--My Fellow Americans, Fire Down Below, Rosewood, and Wild Wild West. (Combined, the four didn't break even.) This despite the comforts of a $3 million annual salary, a $1.5 million producer fee, a five percent cut of the box office, and a $1.75 million yearly overhead allowance. Little wonder that AOL--Time Warner's cost-cutters finally caught up with him.

"To me, spirituality was money and women, in whatever order. I'm sure I behaved improperly in a lot of ways," explains the new, improved Jon Peters. Last May he married his girlfriend of six years, former model and celebrity real estate agent Mindy Williamson (the couple have a three-year-old daughter). The ceremony was performed at the Kabbalah Centre in New York. Peters, who used to spend his evenings at L.A. night-dubs, now burbles that he saw Shrek five times. Is this real? Who can say? For the moment, at least, he seems intent on making up for all the bad behavior that made him, for better or worse, a standout producer.

Hoping to build on the success of Ali, he wants to reconnect with the business of making movies. "He's more active than I've seen him in a long time," says Canton. He's developing a hip-hop version of A Star Is Born and courting a high-profile director for a Superman movie. But this time he'll do it, he says, without predatory spirit. "Lay back! Lay back! Credit will come," he says the rabbis tell him. In keeping with that, Peters is happy to share any good that might come from Ali not just with Mann but also with former pal Guber, with whom he never reconciled after the Sony fiasco. Carefully avoiding the word Oscar, Peters says, "If I were to win anything, probably I would have to thank him for his enormous help." It would be an interesting test of that little red string on his wrist.

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