That’s what he’s doing now on the phone with Luhrmann. “At one point Dino says, ‘Fox! I’ve got no problem with Fox. But who runs the movie? Universal or Fox?’” Newman is telling his client. The producer’s question is understandable: Alexander the Great looks, for the time being, to be cofinanced by 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures. “I told Dino, ‘I’ll tell you who Baz wants to run the movie.’ And I pointed at him. ‘You. That’s who. Baz didn’t get into business with you, Dino, because you had a piece of material. He got in business with you because he wanted to call upon your expertise. Whatever the politics are, you figure them out.’”
Luhrmann says something that makes Newman laugh — a syncopated blast that sounds something like a seal barking. A message from an assistant flashes on Newman’s computer screen. “I have someone calling from a set right now, Baz. Can I call you back?” He punches his phone. “Hel-lo!” he says to one of the producers of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. They talk briefly about springing Lucy Liu early so she can appear on The Tonight Show. “All right,” he says. “Get back to me as soon as you can.”
Another call is put through. It’s one of the producers of Pitch Black, the movie that made Vin Diesel an action star. Newman, who has always loved genre pictures and what he calls “trash,” represents David Twohy; who wrote and directed the film and who is doing the same with the sequel, Chronicles of Riddick. Twohy has finished a draft of the script, but Newman won’t hand it over until Twohy’s contract with Universal Pictures is agreed upon. Now he’s delivering that message.
“My feeling, just so you know where I’m coming from on this, is that the economic issues are real,” Newman tells the producer. He appears to be enjoying himself, like a dancer who knows all the steps. “The folks at Universal are good guys, so I’m not unduly concerned. But we’d like to see that reflected in the paperwork.” He looks up, smiles conspiratorially, then issues a directive to be passed on to Universal’s top executives. “Just make sure they know that they should be encouraging their colleagues in business affairs to conclude the deal,” he says. “Then they can see the script.”
Newman slides off his headset. “I have a large degree of empathy for the studios,” he says. “I know what their profit margins are. They’re slim. I know where the studios make money that they acknowledge, and I know where they make money that they don’t acknowledge in terms of the fact that they own their own cable systems and TV networks. When you say you’ve spent $40 million on advertising, but $20 million went to ABC, which is part of your larger conglomerate, there’s nothing untoward about that. But …”
He starts again. “Look, directors put years of their lives into doing a project. So if a movie’s a runaway hit, I want them to participate.”
ROBERT NEWMAN DOESN’T KEEP A DIARY. He compiles scrapbooks. They are filled with color snapshots of movie people that he takes with a point-and-shoot camera. He keeps them at home, not at the office. “One day I made a decision,” he says. “I’m going to get to see a lot of things in this job, and I want to remember them.”
It took months, however, to get him to show me shots of himself with Tim Robbins at the MTV awards, Harvey Weinstein at Disneyland, Leonardo DiCaprio on a movie set in Thailand, and Jennifer Lopez and Colin Farrell standing in front of corporate jets. Newman works in an industry in which exploiting one’s connections to fame is an integral and accepted part of doing business. Yet Newman’s photographs of public people are, to him, private. “This isn’t big-game hunting for me,” he says. “These are just my remembrances.”
At this point you’re probably wondering: Is this guy too good to be true? I wondered, too. Backbiting in Hollywood is like grooming in a family of apes — everyone does it to everyone else. But ask people about Newman, and the sniping pretty much stops.
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