Neal Moritz: Puttin' on Moritz

Neal H. Moritz Launched Joshua Jackson as a movie star by putting him in three films. Ryan Phillippe, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Cellar have each made two Moritz films. Paul Walker has made one and Wes Bentley and Leelee Sobieski are about to take the plunge. No wonder the producer is considered Young Hollywood's secret weapon.

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In Hollywood right now, nobody bats an eye when a twenty something actor lands a multimillion-dollar studio production deal. Or when an actor with a scant three movies to his credit gets thrust into the lead role in an $80 million movie. Or when a teen movie/TV star becomes the linchpin of a billion-dollar industry. Even five years ago, such occurrences would be unheard of. But thanks to a bloodless revolution led by people responsible for such phenomena as the Scream trilogy, "Dawson's Creek," "South Park," The Blair Witch Project and American Pie, Young Hollywood is preeminent in the minds of studio executives. The name Neal H. Moritz doesn't strike as instantly familiar a chord as the name Kevin Williamson does, but Moritz has had at least as much to do with the palace coup, and as time goes on his influence seems to be on the rise. He is the producer behind both I Know What You Did Last Summer movies (which put together Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Cellar, Ryan Phillippe and Freddie Prinze Jr. on the big screen); Cruel Intentions (which changed the perception of Sarah Michelle Gellar and enhanced the status of Ryan Phillippe, Reese Witherspoon and Selma Blair); Urban Legend (which, though not a blockbuster, rented like crazy and worked magic for Rebecca Cayheart, Tara Reid and Joshua Jackson); the recently released The Skulls, which could make movie stars out of Joshua Jackson, Paul Walker and Leslie Bibb; and the upcoming Soul Survivors, which stars American Beauty hottie Wes Bentley and Casey Affleck. And now he's busily at work on the thriller The Glass House, starring Leelee Sobieski, while gearing up for Racer X, the car racing movie he believes will send Paul Walker into the stratosphere.

Moritz is no Gen Y-er himself-- he's a trim, black-clad guy who just turned 40 and speaks in the rapid-fire, confident tones of someone with an allergy to small talk--but he is a prime architect of Young Hollywood. It was and wasn't always meant to be this way. As a UCLA student in the early '80s, he developed a successful business making and importing ladles' handbags, but by 1990, he'd had enough, and sent himself back to school--film school (at USC). "After graduating, I basically hung up my shingle and said I was a film producer,"he says. "I found young, often unrepresented writers, and though I had no credits and no power, I was able to convince them to write screenplays for me, a lot of them based on my ideas." Without actually selling a project, Moritz got a modest production deal going at Paramount. All of this with no influence and no previous connection with the movie business? Well, no. "My family had always been involved with the movie business. Like most kids, I'd grown up wanting to get as far away from the 'family business' as I could. My grand-father, a Polish immigrant, owned a lot of little businesses, one of which was a downtown L.A. movie theater. One of his ushers was Jim Nicholson, who borrowed $5,000 from him to start a distribution company with Sam Arkoff. My dad became the head of marketing and publicity and my grandfather was the treasurer. That company became American-International Pictures."

American-International, for those too young to remember, made a mint cranking out modestly budgeted movies aimed squarely at date-night audiences. Today the company is fondly remembered as the spawning ground for such talents as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola, as well as beloved, if less critically defensible, types like Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. In other words, it was a company that grew hugely successful by filling theater sears with young moviegoers attracted to seeing young stars in vehicles that were created by brash young writers and directors. Moritz is nothing if not a latter-day proponent of the AIP master plan. "I'm very much a product of my roots," he asserts. "What they did at AIP is absolutely similar 10 my philosophy. There, they would create the poster before they would make the movie. Here, I have to know how I'm going to sell a movie before I make it. The only things I want to make are things I know are going to get people off their couches and into the theater on Friday night. The adult audience? It's hard to even get them out of the house. My audience is young, and some-thing I know about them is that they want to get out of the house.

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