Up close and personal. (Inside the Books--Banking & Finance Special Report).

THE romanticized image of a toy maker is the jovial man with a grandfatherly demeanor, someone with toys stacked high in his office/workshop.

Jack Friedman is not that man.

Friedman, chairman and chief executive of Jakks Pacific Inc., is mostly about business, colleagues say, and the 63-year-old founder of three companies is only in his element when he's running things.

"You can't be an entrepreneur when you work for someone," said Stephen Berman, Jakks' co-founder and president.

These days, Friedman mostly handles Jakks' business development, which means working his contacts in the industry and scanning the globe for new licenses and acquisition targets.

Forget the image of Tom Hanks goofing his way to toy industry success in "Big."

"He's not a big kid in the toy store," said Joel Bennett, Jakks' chief financial officer. "But he does keep it semi-fun."

The Queens, N.Y. native started his career in the 1960s as a sales representative for toy maker Norman J. Lewis Associates. That exposure got Friedman thinking about new products, and in 1970 Friedman, with the backing of Lewis, was running his first toy company, LJN Toys.

Lewis (LJN are his initials in reverse) sold his share of the business to a Chinese investor. Friedman stayed on and by 1983, the New York company grew to generate revenues of $51 million.

The growth was such that LJN caught the eye of MCA Inc., then-parent of Universal Studios, which was on a toy business buying spree in 1985. In a $32 million stock deal, MCA took a 63 percent stake in LJN. Friedman, who declined to comment for this story, signed a long-term employment agreement and moved to L.A.

Two years later he was off to start a new project. "He didn't enjoy working for an employer," Berman said.

Friedman emerged in 1990 as founder and chairman of THQ Inc., the Calabasas video game company that now has a market cap of $1 billion. A year after its founding, THQ went public by merging into a shell corporation, raising $30 million in the process. Friedman sold his then-46 percent stake for $13 million.

At first, Friedman had the company acquire film licenses and develop them into video games -- a common strategy in the early days of software development. THQ's sales jumped more than 70 percent in 1992 but its earnings stayed flat. Friedman, who was making $950,000 a year, took a voluntary $100,000 pay cut.

"Then, games were more like toys than technology," Bennett said. "It became beyond Jack's comfort zone, he's kind of a low tech guy."

Or, as Friedman told the L.A. Daily News in 1998, "Our games started to fare poorly, and I was very frustrated, not being a gamer myself and not being familiar with the technology."

The tough luck continued, and in 1994 THQ lost almost $18 million on sales of $13 million. Friedman left the company in 1995, succeeded by Brian J. Farrell.

Friedman and Berman formed Jakks in April 1995, capitalized by $3 million, largely of their own funds.

"This is like a dream come true," Friedman said of Jakks in the Daily News interview. "When you have a picture in your head and you get there with few bumps, it's exciting."