Samuel Goldwyn Jr.

People tell Samuel Goldwyn Jr. a lot of stories. Some are funny, others are dramatic. The best have vivid characters and a strong plot. Each week, Goldwyn listens to an anthology of these seemingly worthy tales. After all, you never know when one might become a great film.

Goldwyn, 68, has been making movies this way for more than four decades. The Samuel Goldwyn Co. has carved an impressive niche as a producer and distributor of well-crafted and critically acclaimed domestic and foreign films, made on modest budgets. With luck, such approval means commercial success. Lately though, times have been a bit tough: The company reported an operating loss of $8.6 million in the nine months ended Dec. 31, 1994, on revenues of $66 million. This compares to a gain of $10.9 million and revenues of $88.5 million in the same period a year before.

To alleviate its dependence on film production, the independent company has developed a three-tiered diversification strategy. So Chairman and CEO Goldwyn also develops television concepts, scoring big with the internationally popular and lucrative "American Gladiators." His company has an extensive library of new and vintage movies, and operates the country's largest specialized theater chain, with about 125 screens nationwide and another 14 near completion. The theaters, in fact, were the company's biggest revenue generators in the year ended March 31, 1994, the latest fiscal year for which figures are available, bringing in $40.3 million of a total $108 million. Film distribution revenues of $39.4 million came next, with the remainder from television programming.

That's entertainment - Goldwyn-style. Yet for him, the lights, camera, and action first need a script. It was much the same for Goldwyn's legendary father, whose name he shares and in whose house he lives. "The essence of a good movie is still a strong story," Goldwyn insists, offering his basic tenet that stories make stars, not vice versa.

And the Goldwyn Co. is sitting on a trove of classic tales. Its film library includes close to 1,000 titles, many of them screen gems with intrinsic theatrical, licensing, and merchandising value. More than 70 of those pictures were perhaps the most important asset bequeathed to Goldwyn by his father, the Hollywood pioneer and acclaimed independent film producer famous both for his vision and his temper. "My father had to borrow money from the bank, and that movie had to make enough money to pay the bank so he could own the negative," Goldwyn explains. "He believed everything was the negative."

What negatives they are, including: "The Best Years of Our Lives," "Wuthering Heights," "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," and "Guys and Dolls."

The pictures Samuel Goldwyn Sr. owned are held in Goldwyn family trust, and the company distributes 53 of them for home and theatrical viewing. Once the company recovers its distribution costs and takes an additional one-third of the revenue, the family trust receives the rest. These films are also important to secure creditor financing for current projects.

The company's film library has grown considerably since those original Goldwyn reels. For example, when Goldwyn bought the North American movie and television rights to the 400-title Rank Films library last September for an undisclosed price, it added a collection of early British efforts that includes Alfred Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps" and David Lean's "Great Expectations."

Every few years, the Goldwyn Co. has its film library appraised, though it refuses to divulge what these considerable assets could fetch from an interested buyer. It's worth noting that in 1986, before cable television and home videos had grown into a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry, media titan Ted Turner spent $1.3 billion for the 3,400 films, television programs, and cartoons that comprised the esteemed library of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the movie studio that Goldwyn Sr. helped create. To be sure, The Samuel Goldwyn Co.'s library is much smaller, but, as Goldwyn himself points out, "it's the real estate."

Seeking to leverage that real estate, the company last December signed an exclusive, four-year deal with Hallmark Home Entertainment, a leading supplier of television programming, in which Hallmark will release Goldwyn titles to the domestic home video market. Goldwyn, who owns nearly two-thirds of his public company's shares outstanding, is seeking similar partners. And he says a logical step is for the company to become involved with interactive entertainment - that celebrity marriage of Silicon Valley and Hollywood offhandedly known as "Siliwood" - though he admits to not knowing yet where his enterprise fits in.

Just now, however, Goldwyn is especially pleased about his relationship with a mentally disturbed English monarch. Goldwyn's film, "The Madness of King George," garnered four Oscar nominations at this year's Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Nigel Hawthorne, and won a statue for Best Art Direction.

The tale of King George IIl's brush with insanity was already a hit on the London stage when Goldwyn saw it. And in that darkened West End theater, Goldwyn - an avid reader of both history and thrillers - could visualize the material on screen. That's a film producer's job, he explains: finding the right subject and the talent to make it.

"I try to look at things from an audience point of view," he says. "Why do I care about the journey I'm taking with these people? Why should anybody spend seven bucks for this experience? If you don't have some-place to plug in, you're in trouble."

Yet who would have thought movie audiences would connect with a self-absorbed 18th century royal whose watermark in history is losing the American colonies to a band of revolutionaries? Even the playwright needed convincing. Besides its abstract material, the work had no bankable stars, and its $11 million budget was higher than the $8 million to $10 million Goldwyn typically spends to make a picture. "'George,"' admits Goldwyn, "was a big gamble."

Such end runs are not out of Goldwyn's character. Since he founded his company in 1979, Goldwyn has brought scores of remote stories to the screen, many of which leave the cutting room - and audiences - with an edge. A brief list includes "Much Ado About Nothing," "To Sleep With Anger," and "Mystic Pizza." The company receives about 75 scripts a week, and the best find their way to Goldwyn. On average, he green-lights production or distribution of about a dozen movies a year.

Simply put, Goldwyn is cautious enough to gamble on a project and confident enough to pass. You can read what you like into a man who says his favorite films are the first two "Godfather" pictures; his father's "The Best Years of Our Lives"; and "Captain Blood," an early Errol Flynn swashbuckler about a prisoner-turned-pirate, which Goldwyn has seen 13 times. For the CEO, a successful Hollywood executive, like sword-swinging Flynn on a parapet, must strive for balance, stay in the fight, aod survive to watch the credits roll.

Does "Captain Blood" have a happy Hollywood ending, where Flynn's character reforms? Goldwyn laughs and fires back, "A good pirate never reforms."

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Profile: Samuel Goldwyn Jr., chairman and chief executive. The Samuel Goldwyn Co.

Born: September 7, 1926, Los Angeles.

Education: University of Virginia.

Family: Wife and six children.

Boards: Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; UCLA's Dean's Advisory Board; president of Samuel Goldwyn Foundation.

Last book read: "The Private Life of Chairman Mao," by Dr. Li Zhisui.

Greatest influence: His father, Samuel Goldwyn, and Edward R. Murrow.

Favorite movies: First two "Godfather" pictures, "The Best Years of Our Lives," and "Captain Blood."

Basic business tenets: "It's not important what you did yesterday. It's what you put on the screen tomorrow"; "Stories make stars, not vice versa."