What saved De Luca is that, at the box office at least, the roller coaster has largely been a thrill ride. Hollywood studios always grouse about inflated star salaries and out-of-control directors–and still line up to pay them. De Luca, meanwhile, has built New Line’s reputation by taking chances on no-names and first-timers. He’s the Loehmann’s shopper in a town addicted to buying retail at Barneys, picking up cast-off projects and turning them into low-budget Gen-X and -Y smashes: “The Mask,” “The Wedding Singer,” “Rush Hour,” “Boogie Nights,” “Austin Powers.” De Luca has just been named Variety’s “Showman of the Year.” This fall his studio will release “Magnolia,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s highly anticipated follow-up to “Boogie Nights.” And cameras are about to roll on the most ambitious project in New Line’s history, a three-film, $180 million adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. If anybody in Hollywood was hoping De Luca would get fired after Oscar night, it was only so they could hire him. This summer he was approached by Universal, DreamWorks, MGM and Sony. “I understand why they didn’t let him go,” says Sony chairman John Calley. “We would have loved to have had him.”
The key to De Luca’s professional life (and his personal life, too, perhaps) is that he has yet to outgrow the movies he makes–an asset at a time when studio heads around town are graying. De Luca had a blue-collar childhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up listening to Pink Floyd, Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen. These days he’s into Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock. He plays Quake and Half-Life on his office computer–if you’re on the phone with him and you hear gunfire, you can assume you’re boring him–and reads Dark Horse comics like “Sandman” and “Sin City.” De Luca wears shirts, jeans and black motorcycle boots. He keeps his Harley at the office “so I can cut in traffic and I won’t be late.” Notorious for late-night partying, he once tried to have 9 a.m. staff meetings, but quickly decided that 11 a.m. was more realistic.
De Luca first rolled into New Line in 1985, an unpaid intern attending New York University. He cut his teeth on the company’s first real triumph, the “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise, and was made the head of production in 1993. In short order, Ted Turner bought New Line and Time Warner swallowed up Turner. For the first time in its history, New Line had deep pockets–and there was a 28-year-old kid running the show. De Luca–with his silver hoop earrings and his windblown Harley hair–was an improbable-looking executive, to say the least. “I was always mistaken for the messenger,” he says. Early on, De Luca knew no one in Hollywood and, despite the success of “Nightmare,” the studio had distressingly little cachet. “New Line was our last stop,” says Jim Wiatt, president of William Morris Agency.
Then came “The Mask.” The Jim Carrey vehicle cost just $18 million–De Luca was the last executive to pay the comic $450,000 or anything remotely like it–and grossed $324 million worldwide. New Line followed its “Mask” triumph with another Carrey smash, “Dumb & Dumber.” The studio also scored with the gruesome hit “Seven,” which starred Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow–then early enough in her career that she didn’t object to the fact that her head wound up in a box. Needless to say, hits beget friends. De Luca became the darling of every young agent who had an unknown client dying to be a star. Around 1995, however, he began spending more lavishly and stumbled badly with an expensive string of flops–“The Long Kiss Goodnight,” “Last Man Standing” and the epically weird “The Island of Dr. Moreau” among them. According to New Line chairman Shaye, the studio lost $100 million that year alone.
De Luca’s personal life unraveled at roughly the same time. After dating movie stars like Julianne Moore, he suddenly married a junior executive he’d hired three months earlier. The marriage quickly fell apart. De Luca was thrown out of his favorite restaurant, Chaya Brasserie in West Hollywood, after an altercation with a neighboring diner. And then there was his lewd Oscar-party performance, after which Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin phoned De Luca personally to express his concern. Friends of De Luca’s say the conversation was humiliating for the executive, and served as a wake-up–and grow-up–call.
Lately, De Luca has rebounded in high style with “The Wedding Singer,” “Rush Hour” and the sequel to “Austin Powers.” He has also solidified his reputation as an executive willing to bet on risky and unusual material. He picked up “Austin Powers” after other studios had passed–“Mike was the only one who read the script and got it,” says producer Suzanne Todd–and he never lost faith. “The first time an audience saw ‘Austin Powers,’ we could hear people laughing, but when the [written comments] came back, people said they hated it,” says director Jay Roach. De Luca took the filmmakers across the street for a drink. “They laughed,” he told them. “It works. Just keep going like you are.”
De Luca can afford to back his hunches because he has the support of New Line’s chairman. (Shaye retains the ultimate authority to green-light the movies that De Luca chooses for the studio.) De Luca says, “Coming off the worst year in our history, I walked into [Shaye’s office] with ‘Boogie Nights,’ a 170-page epic on porn in the ’70s and a guy with a 13-inch penis. And he was fine with it.” Now De Luca is embarked on his wildest gamble yet, the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. The project has a little-known director, Peter Jackson, and no big stars. Still, De Luca is typically cocksure when he discusses the project. “Maybe it’ll stink. Or maybe it’ll be ‘Star Wars’.”
For what it’s worth, Hollywood seems to be rooting for De Luca again, and his bad-boy reputation is clearly receding. When Variety named him “Showman of the Year,” a slew of stars, directors, agents, producers and competitors took out ads to congratulate him, as is the custom. Carrey, Ben Stiller, Gene Simmons from Kiss, Jason from “Friday the 13th” and on and on. Chaya Brasserie–the restaurant that once ejected De Luca for brawling–sent its love. And New York University congratulated its “illustrious alumnus.” As it happens, De Luca didn’t actually graduate from NYU. But a couple of years ago, mostly for his mother’s sake, he lobbied the school for a diploma. It seems he persuaded them to give him course credit for running a movie studio. NYU can’t begin to know the lessons he’s learned.
