AN IMAGE FOR EVERYONE TITLES, FORMATS RUN THE GAMUT.

Byline: Greg Hernandez Staff Writer

CHATSWORTH - With an autographed Bruce Springsteen guitar on one wall, sports memorabilia on another and framed crayon drawings by his children hanging near his desk, the decor in Martin Greenwald's expansive office at Image Entertainment is about as eclectic as the company's video offerings.

Niche DVDs that include such fare as obscure pre-1950 horror films, classic rock concerts, Broadway shows, hip-hop, classical concerts and entire seasons of classic television shows are all being produced with fast- paced precision within the walls of Image.

``Eclecticism is taken to a new level here,'' said Greenwald, president and chief operating officer of a company that reached $100 million in sales last year.

Image typically buys rights to material that major studios have ignored or deemed noncommercial and produces DVDs that appeal to different niche audiences. It has hit pay dirt in recent years by focusing on the largely-untapped market of music DVDs, and the company also profits handsomely with a line of adult videos from Playboy and Penthouse.

``We're in the 'I want to sell you something you want to buy' biz,'' said Greenwald. ``As soon as you become the gatekeeper, it's over.''

From 1983 until 1997, Image Entertainment was the Goliath of the laserdisc industry, holding exclusive licensing rights for films from the major studios whose executives thought the laserdisc market wasn't big enough to handle in-house.

``They had the luxury, as a laserdisc company, of getting the business of most of the studios who only had their toe in the water in laserdiscs,'' said Scott Hettrick, editor-in-chief of Video Business, an industry trade publication. ``But when DVDs took off so fast and became so big, the studios decided to take out the middleman, and that left Image out there without those relationships.''

The burgeoning DVD industry quickly killed the market for new laserdisc titles, and Image was forced to regroup. It had been the top supplier of laserdiscs with as much 50 percent of the market in a fast-fading format.

``We knew that DVD, even if it failed, would be the replacement for laserdisc, even though the jury was still out on whether it would take over VHS,'' Greenwald said.

Image first struck a deal with now-defunct Orion Pictures to release ``The Silence of the Lambs'' and ``Dances With Wolves'' on DVD and nabbed the rights to ``Sixteen Candles'' and some Monty Python films from Universal Pictures. To get its foot in the door, Image agreed to give up the rights to these early studio DVD titles once sales passed the 3 million mark.

``We knew we had a one- or two-year window to get our act together,'' Greenwald said. ``We needed to go out and license programming and make relationships. We needed to become predators and go out and attack the market.''

Greenwald likened the new strategy to a game of Monopoly; in order to win, the company bought rights to everything it could land.

As Image looks to releasing its 2,000th DVD title later this year, Greenwald said the company has managed to climb back to the heights it occupied in the laserdisc heyday. The company averages 40 to 60 new releases a month in multiple genres, compared with the four or five feature film titles that the major studios release.

``They had a remarkable transformation from independent laserdisc company to a DVD company,'' observed Hettrick.

The company not only manufactures the DVDs, but its Chatsworth staff of about 120 people also designs the packaging, handles the marketing campaigns and constantly seeks out new material. Distribution is done at a separate facility in Las Vegas.

The company hit its stride when it secured rights to make a DVD of the Eagles' ``Hell Freezes Over,'' the reunion concerts in 1994 that spawned a best-selling compact disc. The DVD version is Image's all-time top seller - nearing the 1 million mark in sales.

Six months ago, Image ventured into the musical world of rap and hip-hop with a deal to release ``Thug Angel: The Life of an Outlaw,'' featuring the late Tupac Shakur. The DVD became Image's fastest-seller ever when it was released in April, topping 150,000 shipments out of the gate.

``I was astonished,'' Greenwald said. ``Now that we have released that title, a floodgate has been lifted on urban programming. We are now looking at releasing a whole line of urban CDs.''

The company has also scored with original concert DVDs by country singers Lorrie Morgan and Randy Travis.

``The concert video is turning into enormous business for them,'' said Hettrick. ``Image has taken the concert video to a new level with doing behind-the-scenes (footage) and including interviews and giving the concert video a special-edition treatment.''

Hettrick predicts that some of the studios affiliated with music labels will be doing more concert DVDs, as evidenced by this week's announcement from Warner Home Video that it is teaming with Eagle Rock Entertainment fore a series of such projects, beginning with a Janet Jackson concert video.

The eclectic nature of Image's film offerings continues, with such upcoming titles as the 1959 horror film ``The Giant Gila Monster,'' the Japanese animated series ``Hyper Police,'' the new surfing film ``The Ombak,'' a DVD of gay and lesbian shorts called 'Love Reinvented,'' and a DVD being marketed as a nudist colony double feature: ``Diary of a Nudist'' and ``The Naked Venus.''

The upcoming musical selections are just as eclectic: ``Alanis Morissette Live in the Navajo Nation,'' a concert DVD of the band Deep Purple, complete with behind-the-scenes footage; the musical film ``Copacabana,'' which stars Barry Manilow as a nightclub singer; and the opera ``Il Trovatore,'' featuring Dame Joan Sutherland.

Image also manufactures VHS programming and CDs, and it often markets all three formats together to retailers if the same artist is involved.

``When we license a program, we license it in as many formats as we can and in as many territories,'' Greenwald said. ``We do it all.''

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Martin Greenwald, president of Image Entertainment, sits in his Chatsworth office, decorated to reflect his many interests.

(2 -- color) Bret Hampton, a production editor at Image Entertainment in Chatsworth, works at one of the editing stations. Image makes a wide variety of titles on DVDs, VHS and CDs.

Tom Mendoza/Staff Photographer