UNSPEAKABLE POWER `THE LAST MOGUL' PROVES THE LATE LEW WASSERMAN STILL CARRIES CLOUT.

Byline: Fred Shuster Staff Writer

Lew Wasserman was the movie mogul who ran Hollywood for more than half a century. But even though he's been dead for three years, his reach is still felt in the industry.

The power of this ultimate power player most recently made itself known in the present tense by documentarians working on ``The Last Mogul,'' a film that tracks Wasserman's rags-to-riches story, starting in the mob-controlled speakeasies of 1920s Cleveland and ending with his reign as chairman and CEO of MCA, and then Universal.

According to the director, Barry Avrich, more than 80 insiders were asked to be interviewed for the film. At least 70 refused, with 10 (President Jimmy Carter, Michael Ovitz and Robert Evans among them) ending up on camera. Some interviews were canceled hours before they were to take place. Universal's curtain of silence blanketed past and present employees and collaborators.

``If Hollywood is Mount Olympus, Lew Wasserman is Zeus,'' says Jack Valenti, ex-head of the Motion Picture Association of America, interviewed in Avrich's film.

During a 59-year career, Wasserman worked with everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg, setting the stage for such box-office winners as ``The Sting,'' ``E.T.'' and ``Jaws'' (even though he fought hard not to have Spielberg direct).

A legendary deal-maker with a notorious temper, the executive was a visionary who built Universal Studios into a hit machine, even launching the popular studio tour (onetime superagent Ovitz used to be a tour guide).

Wasserman was able to expand his power into the White House, where he maintained close and financially advantageous friendships with Presidents Carter, Clinton and especially Reagan, whose fortunes were entwined with MCA's. Wasserman's guile and iron-fisted business codes, including the now routine practice of negotiating percentages of a film's profits for clients, are legendary. (Wasserman's 1950 arrangement to have Jimmy Stewart star in the film ``Winchester '73'' for a hefty cut of the profits rather than a flat fee transformed the business.)

``The Last Mogul,'' now playing at the ArcLight in Hollywood, spends a lot of time hinting at Wasserman's rumored mob connections. But as the movie - and three unrelated books on Wasserman make clear - 10 federal investigations of MCA's business dealings were somehow quashed (suggesting it never hurts to have friends in the White House).

We asked Avrich, a Canadian advertising executive whose previous documentary subjects include Dominick Dunne, criminal attorney Eddie Greenspan, and the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, how difficult it was to make a full-length documentary about an executive who famously left no memoirs, never wrote anything down and was never interviewed - and whose credo of silence is still followed today.

Q: What were the major road blocks in making ``The Last Mogul''?

A: When I first started poking around in 1989, while Lew was alive, everyone made it very clear to me that nobody was going to participate, no one's going to go on record. So Lew dies, and I start again and, even though he's dead, there's still nobody willing to participate in the film. They're afraid. Hollywood is the you-never-know town. They all said I'll never get the film made, so I decided I had to find a way to do it. Everybody said you'll never eat lunch in this town again, and I don't care - I'll have dinner.

Q: Wasserman still had reach.

A: The family did not want this film made. We were threatened, we were followed. We had to hide film stock under fake names. Interviews were scheduled, and then canceled at the last minute. It sounds sensational, but it was truly weird. It was almost as if Wasserman reached out from the grave and tried to edit the film.

Q: There was still resistance, even though there have been three books on the subject?

A: There wasn't anything earth-shattering in the film that Hollywood insiders weren't aware of. However, it had to come to life on the screen and a film is larger than life. The family got nervous, plus, after someone dies, there's a mythology at that point where you forget about the bad stuff and the person is canonized. And that's what happened when Lew died in '02.

Q: It's surprising that the people whose lives were adversely affected by Wasserman refused to talk.

A: Those people wouldn't go on camera for an interesting reason. Not because they were afraid, but because, they said, ``I'm not interested in seeing his name in print one more time.'' They didn't want to give Wasserman any more publicity. But even without as much participation as we'd like, we were able to get a wide range of interviews.

Q: I kept waiting to hear Wasserman speak, yet the only spoken words in the film from the man are a ``thank you'' at the Oscars, and a short eulogy at the funeral of (MCA founder) Jules Stein.

A: This was a man that was never interviewed. He came from an era where you didn't need to write anything down. A handshake, your word, was a deal. You didn't need paperwork. Yes, there were thousands of pieces of paper generated in the company - they just never touched Lew's desk. He came in and said, ``You wanna make that picture? Fine, paper it.'' And someone else handled the paperwork. He wasn't interested in leaving a trail.

Q: As your film makes clear, the mob ties were never proven.

A: My feeling is, Lew grew up in a time and place where he had two choices - go to school and become an accountant or hang out in the nightclubs where the broads, and the action, and the real characters were. Everything in his life was about business. He rarely traveled, unless it revolved around business. He was incredibly secretive about his life and dealings. He lived for the numbers.

Q: After MCA was sold in 1990 to Japanese conglomerate Matsushita (which five years later unloaded it to Seagram), Wasserman continued to hang around the lot, coming in every day and having lunch in the commissary. Is there an underlying message here?

A: Know when to leave the building.

Fred Shuster, [phone]

fred.shuster(at)dailynews.com

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Photo:

Lew Wasserman, left, signs contracts for the construction of the Sheraton Universal Hotel in 1964 with actress Tippi Hedren and Sheraton president Ernest Henderson III. Behind them are cast members of ``McHale's Navy.''