David Permut: By Permut Only

Permut crosses his arms, shoots me a challenging, prideful gaze, and asks, "You want to know what I am, right? I'm some one who's doing exactly what he wants to be doing.

There are times when I wonder maybe whether I was born too late, times when I say, 'Jesus, I should have been around in the days of Adolph Zukor; maybe I should be eating at Romanoff's.' But the biggest challenge in this business, my source of personal satisfaction is: I love to be told no. I'm maybe self-abusive--no, not self-abusive, but I like to be abused. I mean, you get beat up in the business because it's hammered into you, whatever the project and its challenges: You can't do it, you can't do it, YOU CAN'T DO IT! I like to be the guy who does it."

So, it's like what film executive David Friendly has told me: "David's strengths are that movies are all he does with his life, that he's impervious to rejection, that he has boundless, infectious likability and enthusiasm, and that he's an unparalleled salesman. It's like he shows you material and pretty much says, 'Look, if you don't want it in blue, I've got it in green, or with polka dots.'"

How did this guy get this way, anyhow? It probably helped that he grew up on Long Island, New York under the watchful eye of a wealthy industrialist father and a progressive, health-minded mother. His older brother was good-looking, smart and athletic, alongside his exceptionally bright, law-school-minded younger sister; Permut was the tunnel-visioned dreamer. "I didn't do too well in Spanish class," he recalls, "but my seventh grade teachers used to have to confiscate my Variety and Hollywood Reporter. All I wanted was to be in the film business." After his family moved to Beverly Hills, Permut became, at 15, owner, chairman of the board and sole sales man of Beverly Hills Map Company, purveyors of maps to the stars' homes. "It was Tijuana in Beverly Hills," Permut says, laughing. "While other kids in my neighborhood were selling lemonade, I was stuffing my pockets by selling their parents' addresses. I'd start at $3 a map and go down to $2 or even $1 if I had to. The best part was meeting people who came by, like Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn or Randolph Scott's wife, who gave me an umbrella because she thought I was getting too much sun."

Perhaps he did. When local residents circulated a petition that aimed to drive Permut and his fellow map-sellers from the neighborhood, the adolescent took a meeting with his local councilman, Ed Edelman, along with his two friendly competitors, both older women. He recalls telling Edelman, '"Look, I could be on drugs, these ladies could be on welfare,' but Ed sided with his powerful constituents. So, I got a lawyer who had represented me years before when we had a situation when my electric blanket caught fire, and, with the ladies, I proceeded to launch lawsuits. This was to be a test case." Already media-wise, Permut videotaped the police arrest of one of the old map-hawkers, then sold the tape to NBC. The case went to the state supreme court. Bottom line: Permut claims he made "a small fortune" at his business and today, on the corner of Baroda and Mapleton, that same woman still sells maps to the stars' homes. All very "you can fight City Hall," of course, but surely more was expected of the son of an industrialist. "My parents thought I was very enterprising," Permut protests, tongue firmly in cheek, then admits, "but they thought it would be a good idea to have something to fall back on."

For Permut, something to fall back on was film studies at UCLA. But during his freshman year, when he was 18 and working summers at a PR. firm booking Chuck Norris into high schools for karate demonstrations, his father mentioned over dinner that he had met in a bar "a fiery red-headed Irishman from Oklahoma who claimed he was going to reunite The Beatles." Enter entrepreneur Bill Sargent, one of Hollywood's most fabulous, legendary hucksters, and the man who would become perhaps the most important influence on David Permut's professional life. In the mid-'60s, Bill Sargent had made millions by shooting on video, transferring to film, and releasing as movies such "events" as the The T.A.M.I. Show, which featured astonishing performances by James Brown, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Chuck Berry.

Later, in fabulous "Electronovision"--that is, also on video--came Richard Burton in Hamlet and Carol Lynley and Ginger Rogers in Harlow, the latter rushed into theaters to beat out producer Joseph E. Levine's expensive, hugely publicized version of the life of the '30s screen siren. Permut tracked down Sargent--who, at the time, operated out of an office the size of a table, drove a Chevrolet Corvair, and lived next to the Ventura Freeway--and became the entrepreneur's assistant, or as he puts it, strapped himself in "for the wild ride of my life.

"Sargent, who used to call me, affectionately, 'Little Jew,' is either a billionaire or on the canvas and counted out. He was seductive, infectious, an anachronism. The Beatles reunion got sidelined for a while when I found a Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee play, The Gang's All Here, that I'd read in school. Bill optioned it for a dollar and signed Lloyd and Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, Robert Culp, Ben Johnson, Arthur O'Connell, Tom Bosley and William Windom to do a limited-run stage show at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco and to film it as he had Hamlet and Harlow.

Meanwhile, Maude Chasen was letting him eat free at her restaurant and he was borrowing a Cadillac because he couldn't take Lee Grant out in a Corvair, and I'm giving him my movie map money to keep things flowing. Also, meanwhile, we're dealing with Western Costume, phones that never stop ringing, and stars leasing homes in San Francisco." The curtain never rose. Cameras never rolled. Sargent couldn't secure the finances and, according to Permut, "disappeared, literally, leaving me there in an empty office with the phone ringing. I didn't hear from him again for years."

Permut got involved in the production of a succession of seat-of-your-pants flicks and, later, served a brief, unfulfilling stint as an agent. Then one day in 1975 Permut's phone rang and his secretary said, "There's a man on the line who says you'll know him by his initials: B.S." Permut found himself being whisked in a Rolls to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where Sargent was ensconced in a suite replete with spiral staircases and magnums of champagne. Flush from an investment by one of Georgia-Pacific's larger shareholders at the time, Sargent proceeded to train five cameras on James Whitmore during his one-man performance as Harry Truman in Give 'em Hell Harry, and released the results three weeks later in about 1500 theaters. The movie, which cost, says Permut, "$230,000, including the party," did $11 million at the box office.

Permut and Sargent wanted to tackle other, bigger video-to-film "events": A Chorus Line, Evita, Walter Matthau as Casey Stengel, and the prize: a reunion of The Beatles. The two took a meeting with one of George Harrison's attorneys. "Bill said, 'I want to make an offer--$40 million,' then, three seconds later, he said, 'No, make it $50 million!' We were thrown out of the office but Bill said, 'We've got 'em! They're just playing hard to get!' He sent four telegrams to The Beatles offering them $50 million. I'm telling him, 'We have exactly $2 million in the bank, where are we going to get the other 48?' but he told me, 'Don't worry, it's a technicality.' He rented us the entire seventh floor at 1888 Century Park East, all of us had to have our own limos, WATS lines, a Learjet, offices full of antiques. He was a dreamer, so convinced that he would be the man who would reunite The Beatles that it wound up in 1976 on the cover of People. Had he succeeded, think what could have happened."

Sargent's show-biz undoing came with "Death Match," a proposed closed-circuit TV, beamed-around-the-world fight in an 80-foot diameter pool between a man and an 18-foot great white shark. "It got pretty insane," recalls Permut, who was 22 at the time and still living at home. "The U.N. tried to ban the fight in U.S. waters. We got chased out of Fiji, because they considered the shark godlike, and we wound up in Western Samoa. Caesars Palace was going to broadcast the fight to the main showroom. We had Madison Square Garden, the Forum. Jimmy the Greek had odds on the shark." In the end, the whole sideshow imploded when Sargent could only rustle up a sand shark considerably smaller than the one he'd promised.

Sargent was to turn up for a third time in Permut's life, in 1979, to film Richard Pryor's one-man show on two consecutive nights at the Long Beach Terrace Theater. Though the whole project cost only $750,000, no studio wanted to touch it, so Sargent and company booked the movie themselves and it made over $30 million domestically.

When the Pryor movie allowed Permut to "go legitimate," he and Mark Travis, another Sargent protege who'd been in on the Pryor film, landed a deal at Columbia, during which they were instrumental in bringing Cheech and Chong to the studio. Later, Permut struck an agreement with Lorimar and, later still, with United Artists. But Permut admits that none of his projects--which included a Sargent-like filming of the Broadway show Ain't Misbehavin'--clicked until, one night, while "lying at home, flipping through 30 channels, which I constantly do, I watched an old 'Dragnet' rerun and, two channels away, saw Dan Aykroyd on a 'Saturday Night Live' rerun doing a 'Dragnet' skit. I'm not a rocket scientist. The next day, I went to Universal with Dan Aykroyd and sang a four-note pitch: 'Dum-dum-DUM-dum.'"

The resulting movie, which starred Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, was sufficiently successful to flood Permut's offices with ideas for more of the same. "I wasn't interested in, you know, Flipper: The Movie" says Permut, "and I wasn't interested in being the illiterate producer who gets his ideas from sitting home and watching TV."

Nevertheless, Permut initiated The New Little Rascals, which he says Universal is actively developing; and with Dale Launer, he will be an executive producer on The Beverly Hillbillies, which Fox has in the works. Today, Permut has some 40 projects in various stages of development--including the long-delayed ,i>Palm Beached, a musical comedy-drama based on the real-life adventures of a socialite onto whose beachfront estate landed a grounded Venezuelan tanker full of sailors.

Permut is scrupulously guarded when it comes to questions about his personal life (for the record: he's single, is very close to his father, lives in a high-rise luxury condominium in Westwood, is building a home in Tucson, Arizona, is a fixture at events like premieres and the MTV Movie Awards). His anecdotes veer pointedly away from the personal just when they promise to be revelatory. For instance, he merrily describes his experience of going to a Native American sweat lodge, replete with "chanting Indians, people stripping naked, very other-worldly," but ask him if he experienced any life-changing experiences and he shrugs and says, "No, but I sweated a lot."

He'd rather boost his movies. So, Three of Hearts is "not an issue picture, but seductive, compelling, emotional, elating," and The Temp "should have audiences laughing and screaming." Still, for all his defenses, he's rather touching when he admits that one of the main reasons he does what he does is ... well, let him tell it.

"One of the biggest reasons I produce movies is access to people like [socialite] Mollie Wilmot [whose story is the basis for Palm Beached] in Palm Beach, who has introduced me to people I wouldn't have met in a trillion years if I were, say, an accountant in Century City. I mean, I go to Canyon Ranch to relax and over there is Don Simpson or Herb Allen or Paula Abdul or Joel Schumacher." So, hanging with the rich and famous is a perk even for the rich and only slightly less famous? "Well, yeah," he says, laughing, "that and an article or two along the way that gives me something nice to send to my Aunt Jean in Miami." Hope you like it, Aunt Jean.

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Stephen Rebello is a contributing editor of Movieline.

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