In Dad’s footsteps

Several years ago, Neal Moritz had a promising movie about a young undercover cop who gets mixed up with a brazen gang of thieves who street race souped-up Honda Civics at just under the speed of sound. But what the film, then known as “Redline,” needed was a better title.

One night the producer went with his parents to see a documentary about American International Pictures, the fabled B-movie factory that churned out such teen drive-in classics as “Beach Blanket Bingo” and “The Wild Angels.”’

As the movie explained, AIP got its start in 1954 as a film-releasing company with a Roger Corman-directed movie, “The Fast and the Furious.” “Once they started talking about that movie, a bell went off in my head,” Moritz recalls. “I called [Universal Vice Chairman] Marc Shmuger the next morning and said, ‘I’ve got the perfect title.’ ”

Universal acquired the rights to the name and went on to have a huge hit with the Vin Diesel-starring film. “2 Fast 2 Furious,” the Moritz-produced sequel, could be even more successful, having grossed $50.5 million when it opened this past weekend.

The movie itself has strong family ties. Neal’s dad, Milt, worked for 23 years as the head of advertising and publicity at AIP, which was launched by James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff, thanks to a $5,000 loan from Milt’s father, Joe Moritz, a longtime Los Angeles theater owner. Before Milt went to work at AIP, he owned the now-defunct Ritz Theater in Inglewood where, in 1954, he played (you guessed it) “The Fast and the Furious.”

Over the past few years Neal Moritz has become Hollywood’s hottest producer of teen-oriented movies, making such hits as “XXX,” “Cruel Intentions” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” As Columbia Pictures Chairman Amy Pascal puts it: “Neal makes pop wish fulfillment movies that are cool. He doesn’t need to second-guess what kids are fascinated with -- it comes completely naturally to him.”

But Moritz’s savvy grasp of the youth culture market doesn’t exist in a vacuum -- he’s drawn on the lessons he learned from his father and AIP, the original spawning ground for teen pictures.

“I don’t know if it was subliminal or hereditary, but AIP had a huge impact on me,” says Neal, 43, who worked in the studio’s mailroom every summer when he was a kid. “I’ve always wanted to make movies that appeal to young people. To me, the biggest night of the year is the MTV Movie Awards, not the Academy Awards.”

With Father’s Day arriving Sunday, it seemed like a perfect time to sit down with a father and son who’ve collectively been satisfying the American teenager’s thirst for spills and thrills for more than four decades. In a business that so rarely honors its past, it’s instructive to see a second generation build on the art or acumen of its predecessors, whether it’s the swagger of Kirk Douglas reflected in Michael Douglas or the visual power of the cinematographer Lucien Ballard echoed in the work of his son, director Carroll Ballard.

Movies as a way of life

Both Moritzes grew up with a front-row seat in the movie business. As a kid, Milt took tickets at his dad’s theaters. In the early 1950s, he went to business college during the day and ran two theaters of his own at night. When Neal was growing up, Vincent Price -- a mainstay in AIP horror films -- would stop by the Moritz’s Westwood home to watch movies in their screening room.

Neal and Steve, one of his younger brothers, were assigned projectionist duties. “I hated it,” Neal recalls. “We’d hear this bell go ‘ding-ding’ as the film was almost running out and we’d have to run over and change the reel and rewind the old reel and every time you’d do it, you’d slice your finger.”

Neal majored in economics at UCLA and started a business selling women’s purses. The business did well, but having grown up around the game, he missed the excitement of movies. After graduating from USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program, he embarked on a career as a producer. He struggled for years before getting his first feature, “Juice,” made in 1992.

As he told the story at lunch last week, he glanced across the table at his dad. “I don’t think you were very happy about my becoming a producer, were you?” he asks.

“We tried to talk him into being a lawyer, an Indian chief, anything but being a producer,” recalls Milt, 70, who now heads the National Assn. of Theater Owners of California and Nevada and is a former chairman of ShoWest. “Having been in the business, I knew that for every one person that makes it, there are hundreds who don’t. But Neal was always very determined. When someone told him no, he never took it as ‘no.’ He took it as ‘they just aren’t ready to say yes quite yet.’ ”

Milt eyed his son, who was on the phone, taking a call from a studio chief. “We have a family photo at home with everyone in the family there, including Neal, who of course is on the phone.”

Hearing the two men talk, you realize that for all the money Hollywood spends on marketing and consumer research, it’s still a business that revolves around ingenuity and salesmanship. At AIP, nobody would dream of making a movie until they had a good title and a tagline for the poster. Moritz, AIP co-founder Nicholson and art director Al Kallis spent countless hours conjuring up titles and a catchy poster design. When AIP made “Beach Party” in 1963, it was Milt who penned the immortal ad copy line: “When 10,000 Kids Meet on 5,000 Beach Blankets.”

Early in the summer of 1957, a Texas theater chain told AIP they had an opening at Thanksgiving for a “combination” -- a pair of low-budget movies they could play at their theaters. “We thought up a pair of titles, ‘I Was a Teenage Frankenstein’ and ‘Blood of Dracula,’ and showed them the posters,” Moritz recalls. “They said, ‘Great, we’ll book them.’ ”

Milt beams. “Only then did we go out and shoot the movies. The two pictures together cost $90,000 and we had them in the theaters in time for Thanksgiving.”

Not much has changed

Yes, the budgets are bigger today but, according to Neal, the business doesn’t operate all that differently. “The studio wanted my next movie, ‘S.W.A.T.,’ for August 2003 and we worked backwards from that date,” he explains. The L.A. cop movie starring Colin Farrell, Samuel Jackson, LL Cool J and Michelle Rodriguez, “was greenlit at the last possible moment that we could’ve started and still have it finished in time. There was no room for error.”

One reason Neal’s movies have been successful is that they’re in sync with the pop culture of the moment, whether it’s the street racing in “The Fast and the Furious” or the extreme-sports thrills in “XXX.” Not long after Neal discovered a stream of Web sites devoted to urban legends, he had a horror movie out called “Urban Legend.”

It’s another lesson he learned from AIP. In the mid-’60s, Milt was in San Francisco for a beach party movie premiere when he saw a copy of the Saturday Evening Post with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang on the cover. Milt showed the magazine to Nicholson and said, “Here’s a great ad.” Within months, Roger Corman had made one of AIP’s most successful biker movies, “The Wild Angels.”

“AIP lived and died on its marketing and nobody was better at it than Milt,” says producer Larry Gordon (“Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”), who was AIP’s production chief early in his career. “And what’s more, he did it on spit. Studios today spend more money on a first week TV ad buy than he could spend on the entire campaign for five different movies.”

AIP was especially resourceful at finding a lemon -- and making lemonade. In 1966 it acquired a Japanese spy movie called “Kagi No Kag,” inserted some additional footage and, memorably, had Woody Allen dub the movie with hilarious non sequiturs. The result: “What’s Up Tiger Lily?”

“We built an ad campaign around this beautiful Oriental girl and we had a whole new movie,” Milt recalls. “We didn’t know what couldn’t be done.”

Like father, like son. After Neal had a hit with “Cruel Intentions,” he created a TV version of the film for Fox called “Manchester Prep.” The network killed the series before it aired. Unfazed, Moritz bought back the six finished episodes, “paying 10 cents on the dollar,” shot five days of connecting footage and -- voila -- created “Cruel Intentions 2,” a made-for-video sequel.

Now that he’s a father himself, Neal, a renowned workaholic, says he’s trying to balance family and career. “I know how valuable that time was that I had with my dad,” he says. “No matter how busy he was, he was always home for dinner. He always told me, ‘Be truthful, be great to your family and even in such a competitive business, try to be nice.’ ”

Milt’s influence hasn’t waned. At the “2 Fast 2 Furious” premiere the other night, someone asked Neal how he would describe the film. Without hesitation he said, “It’s the best drive-in movie of the summer.” Most kids flocking to see it have never set foot in a drive-in, but it was a description Neal knew his father would understand better than anyone.

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have comments, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.