Word: halmy
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...secret to Halmi's success," notes producer Judd Parkin, former head of movies and mini-series at ABC, "is that he is so doggedly contrarian. So much of TV is the same, but when Halmi comes into the room, you know you are not going to get pitched another date-rape movie." Moreover, Parkin says, "he's a great raconteur, very passionate. He gets right to the heart of the matter. He's very...
...Indeed, Halmi, who runs his company out of Manhattan and divides his time between his town house there, his estate in Kenya and a home in Marbella, rarely even spends the night in Los Angeles when he has business in that city. "I don't want to have breakfast and everybody is talking about deals," he says...
...Halmi may not relish talking about show business, but he can't escape the fact that he is show business. His life is even something of a mini-series. Born in Budapest and married five times, he fought in the Hungarian resistance before moving in the 1950s to the U.S., where he worked as a LIFE magazine photographer and dabbled in race-car driving before turning to TV as a producer of wildlife documentaries...
Like so many larger-than-life figures, Halmi is prone to hyperbole, inflating his production tabs in talks to the press. (He quoted The Odyssey's bill at $43 million.) "All his numbers are false," jokes Halmi's son, Robert Jr., the CEO of Hallmark Entertainment. "He likes to tell people things cost a lot more money than they really...
Says David Picker, former head of United Artists and a friend of Halmi's: "He's a throwback to the kind of creative producer--Sam Spiegel, David O. Selznick--the cultured, romantic, passionate kind, who won't let go of an idea until it happens." And who wants things the way he wants things. When Assante tried to back out of The Odyssey at one point during the production because he was unhappy about the script, Halmi slapped him with a lawsuit for the entire budget of the film. Assante came back, and Halmi conceded to a reworking...