Back In The Ring - Review

Talk, Nov, 2001 by Michael Cieply

Jon Peters, the secret force behind this season's hottest movie, was once dismissed as a washed-up '80s dinosaur. But Ali may prove that the Hollywood-hairdresser-turned-Kabbalah-spouting-producer is still a contender.

THIS SEASON'S MOST ANTICIpated movie was born in a quintessential Jon Peters moment. Seven years ago a dozen or so Columbia Pictures executives, producers, lawyers, agents, and Muhammad Ali himself trudged to a bungalow at the Hotel Bel-Air to hear yet another pitch about an Ali movie. Their host was Peters, the onetime Beverly Hills hairdresser, ex-boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, and producer of bits like Rain Man and Batman. But at the time Peters was relatively down and out: He had just been fired after a disastrous and sybaritic 19 months as the cochairman of Sony Pictures, and his mansion had burned down, resulting in a year-long residency at the BelAir at his insurance company's expense.

Putting together a deal for Ali was Peters's gambit to show he wasn't all washed up. As the meeting began Ali, hands trembling, pulled from his briefcase a battered copy of the Koran and clutched it to his chest. Not to be outdone, Peters grabbed a photograph of Streisand and clutched it to his chest. By the time the meeting was over, Ali had signed on. It was a deal sealed over the sacred and the profane, and for the much maligned Peters, a measure of vindication.

Given that Ali is debuting on December 7 and is already generating buzz that it is a surefire Oscar nominee, you would think Peters's accomplishments would be on the lips of everyone in Hollywood. But instead Peters's role in bringing Ali to the screen has been largely erased from the town's historical record. Ali's director, Michael Mann, and star, Will Smith, are poised to claim the glory.

Even though he's credited as producer on what may become the most lauded drama of the year, Peters's career still seems stone cold. "The dirt has settled on his grave. He's too crazy," declares one agent at Endeavor, who scratches through his 6,500-name Rolodex and finds he doesn't even have Peters's number. Though a spokesman for Warner Bros. insists, "Jon is still a good friend of the studio," his production deal there was severed last March. Sony maintains a stony silence when asked about Peters's involvement with Ali.

The era of the omnipotent, swashbuckling producer is over. Of course, Peters isn't the only casualty of the trend. His former partner Peter Guber has a low-profile deal at Paramount. Don Simpson is dead. Scott Rudin. Jerry Bruckheimer, and Joel Silver avoid headlines and make their movies quietly Meanwhile, top-drawer directors like Mann, Ridley Scott, and Steven Spielberg, and stars like Smith, Tom Cruise, and Drew Barrymore are essentially producing their own projects. Producers now defer to the star, the director, and the studio that's paying the bills--which leaves little room for the legendary madness of the breed. Peters's antics in his heyday were particularly notorious: He once jumped onto the desk of Warners chairman Bob Daly to make a point and, when he was cochairman of Sony, he harangued his Japanese boss all the way to the bathroom.

In a town obsessed with status, the 56-year-old Peters claims not to mind his new anonymity. For the past few years he has remained holed up in his office in a secluded hilltop estate a mile above Sunset Boulevard. Peters says he bought the place to avoid what rabbis call the "evil eye": the envious stare of those who covet what he has.

He has been listening to rabbis a lot lately, though the former wunderkind is a gentile in a famously Jewish industry Peters says he became a devotee of the Kabbalah Centre and its charismatic leader, Eitan Yardeni, after sitting in on a few meetings three years ago. Kabbalah is an international movement that preaches a kind of mystical Judaism tempered with a heady dose of New Age psychospiritual precepts. In a testament to his new faith, Peters wears a piece of red string on his left wrist--a reminder to restrain the "hand of taking." The string is an increasingly common Hollywood talisman. "Madonna--when you see her concert, look on her left hand. You'll see a red string," says Peters, who recently huddled with the singer to discuss his plans to build a Kabbalah ranch for troubled teens. Peters knows from juvenile delinquency He was expelled from a San Fernando Valley junior high school for disciplinary reasons--including raking his mother's car for a joyride--and at 13 was put into a youth detention camp . "We can bring kids in and work with them by saying: Restrict. Be proactive, not reactive. Don't fight," he says.

Peters dates his spiritual awakening to 1998, when he was filming Wild Wild West and suddenly found himself enveloped by "darkness." By his own account he made an enormous amount of money investing in real estate and other ventures, including biotech companies, but he gradually realized he had become lost in "a very selfish place" and was just going through the motions of making films. "My heart wasn't in it," he says. "I never went to the set." He briefly thought about retiring from the movie business, but then, swept up in Hollywood's latest mania, he turned to Kabbalah.