Movie Producers

It's a miracle that producing partners Lawrence Turman and David Foster have stayed together over the years. The movie-making duo is celebrating their 20-year partnership--one of the longest in Hollywood today--with the release of Universal's action-adventure picture "The River Wild," starring Meryl Streep, which was the No. 1 movie at the box office last weekend with an impressive $10.2-million opening.

David Permut, a fast-talking workaholic producer with movies in development at just about every studio in town, had just signed a deal with Disney to make Neil Simon's romantic comedy "The Marrying Man"when his secretary forced him to take a short vacation in Hawaii. Just as the plane lifted off over the Pacific, Permut, 36, the producer of "Dragnet" and "Blind Date," opened one of Hollywood's daily trade publications and panicked.

All filmmakers should have this handicap: Make a comedy for the 25-and-older crowd. The studio sells it as family fare for the preteen set instead. It evolves into one of the holiday season's brighter surprises. All involved are proved right--and wrong--for one simple reason: audience word of mouth, the best advertising money can't buy.

There was a time when David Brown and a partner earned $600 for writing a month's supply of astrological forecasts suitable for use in a penny vending machine. "We tried to be cautiously helpful," Brown said at breakfast earlier this week'Avoid unnecessary risks,' 'Drive with special care,' that sort of thing, or 'Your luck will soon change,' not indicating whether it would change for better or worse." Brown, now 73, has done a lot of things.

When Neal Moritz was a boy, his father, Milton, was head of marketing at American International Pictures, the legendary B-movie factory that invented teen movies, cranking out low-budget beach party, biker and horror films. Moritz's first job was running the projector when his father screened new films at home. When Moritz visited his father at work, he noticed that Milton would often design a poster and an ad slogan for a film before AIP even made the film.

Even by Hollywood standards, the divorce between veteran ICM talent agent Risa Shapiro and horror film producer Oren Koules has been nasty. In more than two years of legal skirmishes, the power couple clashed over allegedly secret multimillion-dollar home deals, a money-losing minor league hockey team and, most pointedly, the landslide of money generated by the "Saw" movie franchise, according to court documents.

After Roy Radin's disappearance, film producer Bob Evans, believing he was Jacob's next target, traveled to Las Vegas to seek help from two friends who he thought were connected to the Mob, as author Steve Wick reports in this excerpt from the book "Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder."

When I turned 18," says actress/producer Shelley Duvall, "I felt I was grown up. Then when I was 21, I reflected, 'Boy, I was just a kid then; now I'm grown up.' The same thing happened when I was 27. It wasn't until I was in my early 30s that I realized it was a futile goal to have. You're never grown up. We're all still dealing with the same hopes, same fears, same dreams that we had as children."

For years, authors have raged about how Hollywood treated their books. Here is the shocking story of what happened when my suspense novel was recently filmed as "Die Hard 2." Early one afternoon in June, 1988, the telephone rang in my study 17 floors above Manhattan's lively Upper West Side. The caller was Tim Knowlton, head of "film rights" at the Curtis Brown literary agency that has ably represented me for a lot of years. Young and direct, Tim cut to the chase.

Let's cut to the chase. His name is Hawk. For most of his life, he was known in Hollywood as Howard W. Koch Jr., working his way up the career ladder on such notable films as "The Way We Were," "Rosemary's Baby," "Chinatown," "Barefoot in the Park" and "Heaven Can Wait," then co-producing films like "Gorky Park," "The Pope of Greenwich Village" and "The Keep." But as the son and namesake of veteran filmmaker and onetime Paramount Pictures studio chief Howard W.