RHI Entertainment’s Robert Halmi, Sr.

June 2007

By Anna Carugati

If you are looking for a modern-day Renaissance man, you
need look no further than Robert Halmi, Sr. A tremendously prolific producer,
he has made more than 200 movies and mini-series through his company RHI
Entertainment. His productions have won 104 Emmy Awards, 15 Golden Globe Awards
and numerous Peabody, SAG, Christopher and Genesis awards.

Beyond his skills at producing lavish TV events, Halmi is a
talented photographer, documentary filmmaker and artist. When you enter his
midtown Manhattan office, it is immediately apparent where he derives his
inspiration from—books, and in particular the classics. His collection of
beautiful leather-bound first editions stand by the side of countless other
volumes on a huge bookcase that runs the length of the wall behind his desk.
And there are more books around the perimeter of the room. Perched on the top
shelf are the dozens of Emmy statuettes and other awards he has won.

Also scattered around the office are props from several of
his movies and mini-series, including the gnome from Snow White: The Fairest
of them All and two baby dinosaurs from Dinotopia. Over the past three decades, RHI has produced a
long list of TV events, including Arabian Nights, Dreamkeeper, Don Quixote, Gypsy, The Josephine Baker Story, The Lion in Winter, Lonesome Dove, Merlin, Moby
Dick, The Odyssey, Human Trafficking, Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in
Heaven, The Poseidon Adventure and The Ten Commandments.

His son, Robert Halmi, Jr., joined the company more than 25
years ago and took over the business side. In 1994, the Halmis sold their
company to Hallmark Cards, named it Hallmark Entertainment and in return got a
guaranteed outlet for their TV product through the Hallmark Channel. In
December 2005, the Halmis bought the company back, renamed it RHI
Entertainment, and are now free to produce a wider range of TV genres.

RHI Entertainment recently signed an agreement with ION
Media Networks, a broadcast group that reaches 92 million homes in the U.S. The
Halmis will provide ION with 12 original productions a year. This year, RHI
will also bring Dracula, Tin
Man, Son of the Dragon, Marco Polo and Pandemic, along with
more than 40 other original mini-series and movies, to television audiences
globally.

At 83, Halmi senior shows no sign of stopping. He is driven
by a desire to bring the classics and other works of literature to life on the
small screen so that younger generations can discover them. His lust for life,
his passion for his work and his beloved books betray the hardships and
harrowing experiences he lived through when he was young. A native Hungarian,
Halmi joined the Resistance during World War II. He was captured and nearly put
to death. After the war, he helped the Americans bring people out of Hungary,
and again escaped death.

You wouldn’t know any of this if you observed him today,
immersed in his craft of creating events for television. He talks about his
life and his work in this exclusive interview with World Screen.

WS: You escaped
death twice. How has that affected your outlook on life?

HALMI: It gave me a
new perspective. I felt anything that happened after that cannot be that bad.
It made me take more risks than most people. If I survived that, obviously, I
can survive anything.

I came to America in 1950. After the war, I had spent time
in Salzburg working for the USIA (United States Information Agency). They were
sending me back to Hungary to bring people out. That became pretty dangerous,
so they decided I should come to the U.S.

I was a photographer, and the reason I succeeded was because
I did things no one else wanted to do. I was jumping out of airplanes. I was
covering wars. I was doing really stupid, stupid things that normal
photographers wouldn’t do. I worked for Life magazine and did a bunch of covers. Then Life went out of business. But I couldn’t work for anyone
else because I was so spoiled at Life—being on top of the world and
making decent money. So I picked up a movie camera and tried to do the same
adventurous stuff by producing documentaries. And then when movie cameras got
to be too heavy, I decided I’d better [start producing], and that’s how I did
my very first movie, in Africa, in 1974. Since then I’ve done 225 movies, more
than any producer I know. I’ve won about 100 Emmys, so it’s been successful.

WS: Your father was
a photographer, too?

HALMI: My mother was
a writer and my father was a photographer, so I grew up in an artistic
atmosphere. And the war made me a bit tougher, and the experience helped me
tremendously when I got here.

WS: Much of your
work is based on books.

HALMI: I love to
read. I went to a very conservative Calvinist school in Hungary, and we had to
read and read and read, and that stuck with me. I would say that 90 percent of
my work is based on books, and out of that maybe 70 percent is based on old
classics. And I love to collect first editions. I have first editions of all
kinds of classics, from Gulliver’s Travels to Arabian Nights. Also during my career I started three or four TV
genres. In 1988, Lonesome Dove
was the first eight-hour mini-series. That started the long-form epic
mini-series. In 1993, I did Gypsy,
which was the first musical on television. In 1996, Gulliver’s
Travels [marked the beginning of] CGI on
television. Before that there was no CGI and no competition with the big
screen. In 2002 I did Dinotopia.
It was the first TV movie that cost $80 million. These are firsts. And I paid
$20 million for the rights to Scarlett.

So it’s a different kind of business. I’m alone, and I’m not
in Los Angeles. I hate Los Angeles. We do everything here [in New York]. My son
is an incredible help to me. He is really the brain behind all of this. He
markets. He gets the financial part of the business done. He is making the
money and I’m spending it, basically that’s the relationship!

WS: And how has your
relationship with the broadcast networks been over the years?

HALMI: My
relationship is that I don’t like to see them too much. I come up with great
ideas and I make a presentation and usually they order it. I put some money
into art. Every time I dream something up I draw it out and I try to explain
what the story is [in pictures]. When we lay this out it’s easier to sell when
people see it. There are mostly stupid people there (at the networks) so they
don’t understand things. They have to see them.

WS: What else are
you working on?

HALMI: I’m trying to
do a mini-series on global warming because it’s in the news and it lends itself
to major events and tragedy. I’m working on three or four mini-series at the
same time.

I’ve made many pictures in Hungary, maybe 15 of them.
Hungary is still one of the best places to make movies. Now it is even better
than before because there are two new studios and for the money—even as
the dollar is so weak—it is still the best deal around Europe. I’m redoing
Dracula. It will be a modern-day Dracula, and we’re shooting it in Transylvania and Hungary.

WS: And the crews
are good?

HALMI: Hungary has a
major history in moviemaking—way back before the war. In fact, their
cameramen are probably the best in the world. Many Hungarian cameramen work in
America and are in top demand. [In the early years of Hollywood] Hungary
provided the U.S. studios with all of the talent. At Fox [there was a saying,] It’s not enough to be Hungarian; you have to have talent, too.

WS: Casting is
critical. When you start working on these mini-series, do you already envision
which actors you want or does that happen later?

HALMI: Once the
script is finished and you read it a couple of times, names pop out. The same
thing happens when I read a book; I read it visually. And while I read the book
visually, I decide whether to make the movie or not. And once I see it, I draw
it out. Then comes the writing and then comes the casting, and of course, the
director. Script, director and casting—you cannot do poorly in any one of
those categories. They all depend on each other.

WS: You sold your
company to Hallmark Cards and then you bought it back. The Hallmark Channel
offered you a guaranteed distribution outlet for your movies and mini-series.
Are you in a better situation now?

HALMI: A much better
situation. We recently made a deal with ION Media Networks. We will program
Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights on a broadcast group that has 92 million
homes in the U.S. That never happened before. It gives us even more freedom.
Under Hallmark, we were very restricted in the kind of movies we could produce.
So we happily bought the company back. We own our library. We have [more than
1,000] titles and we are very happy being on our own. My son just keeps growing
the company, and making deals! I just got a list from him of more classics that
I have to do—11 of them!

WS: You don’t seem
displeased!

HALMI: It’s a nice
environment to be able to work hard.

WS: Why is it so
important to produce movies and mini-series based on classics?

HALMI: Because books
are the basis of our education. Books provide the reference to where we come
from, to what the rest of the world is, to what history is, to what anything
is. And if I can bring books back to the kids to read, I’ve done a hell of a
job.

The biggest crime television committed—as good of an
instrument as it could have been for teaching—was that it took books out
of children’s hands. Kids look at the stupid boob tube and they don’t read. In
my house in Hungary we had no television. The first time I saw television in my
life was when I came to America in 1950, and since then television has been
going downhill. Right now all those reality shows are just horrible and
completely unwatchable for kids. That’s why the Hallmark Channel is good
because you can let kids watch it. And ION is good because kids can watch it,
because this kind of programming is based on books.

After I did Gulliver’s Travels, Simon & Schuster called me and said that in the six months after
the movie aired, they sold more Gulliver’s Travels books than they had in the previous ten years.
That’s good. And every one of these big stories has to be revisited almost
every 15 years, because there is a new audience who never saw the original. So
it’s OK to do these two, three, four, five times in history, because every time
I redo them, there is a new language, there are new sensitivities, new morality
and so the kids have to be up to date. Kids cannot look at [antiquated] language, because then they turn it off—not only kids, grown-ups too.

I did King Lear with
Patrick Stewart. It was fantastic. Now I’m going to do Macbeth. People wouldn’t read that normally, but now they
will see how entertaining it is. And Jekyll & Hyde is basically about schizophrenia and it’s very
important. If you do these things right, then kids are going to be interested
and will pick up a book.

WS: You have been
good at balancing the amount of CGI you use; it doesn’t get in the way of the
storytelling.

HALMI: No, the CGI
must be only an enhancement of the story. When people write books and
especially fantasies, it’s easy to write. “And God created the
world”—boom! But in the movie you have to show that. I don’t do
wall-to-wall CGI, because number one it’s boring, and number two, in Spider-Man
and other such movies [that are full of CGI], there is no story. The story is
in the same five lines. So you really need a story.

WS: When you are
creating a movie, how do you work with the writer?

HALMI: We have major
discussions before he starts writing, and then I let him do his work, and then
afterwards again we have major discussions. The process is loosely four
re-writes.

WS: Do you still go
on the set?

HALMI: Oh yes, I
have to. I’m there during the first week of production for sure, and then in
the middle. For example, I visited the set of Tin Man in
Vancouver several times. And I’m doing Flash Gordon there also at the same time.

WS: What do you
think of Eastern Europe today?

HALMI: I go back.
I’m going to Hungary next month looking around and I’m working with Hungarian
producers and I’m doing a show called The Last Templar, which was
a great book. That will be done with Hungarians. I don’t go there as a tourist
and I don’t go there for nostalgia reasons. I just go there for moviemaking.
And it’s good. When Americans go there and they don’t speak the language…It’s
easy to take advantage of somebody who doesn’t speak the language. With me it’s
not so easy—they cannot do it!

WS: Do you watch TV?

HALMI: Not much. I
watched the Kentucky Derby. I watch the Yankees and I watch Tiger Woods play
golf.

I watch old movies every night. Last night I watched The
Jackal. And you learn from them and you
find out how simple and yet how good they were. Now making a movie is so
complicated. On my first movie I had a crew of 24 and now I have a crew of 400.

WS: From 24 to
400—of course the costs go up.

HALMI: Yes, and what
the actors make today! When I started, $1 million for working in television or
$20 million for a feature film [was unheard of]. Now it’s like nothing.

WS: You have a lot
on your plate now, but you still love it.

HALMI: Sure, what
else would I do? I could easily stop working, but I couldn’t. I hate Sundays
because I can’t bug anybody! Thank goodness I still have a lot of energy. I
still read a lot and travel a lot. I still travel all the time. I’m going to
Vancouver next week and then I’m going to London to start a movie, and then
from London I go to China to start one, and then I do two in Austria.

WS: What’s the last
book you read?

HALMI: I read about
the life of Gertrude Bell. I want to make a movie about her because she did
everything that Lawrence of Arabia took credit for. She really created Iraq.
And if anybody had read her life maybe [our involvement in Iraq] today would be
different. But Gertrude Bell lived 100 years ago and the Brits screwed up the
Iraq situation worse than we did and we never learned because we don’t read.
But she had a fantastic life.

WS: When you look at
the situation in the world today, having lived through what you lived through
in World War II, what is your comment?

HALMI: It’s sad
because we don’t learn from the past and also it’s sad because we don’t have
enough knowledge. We have no clue about the Middle East. We don’t know anything
about the Sunnis or Shiites and we just go in and decide. The biggest crime was
committed by the [British Empire] about 100 years ago when they [arbitrarily] created countries like Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Iraq or Kenya and
Uganda. And it doesn’t work. Somebody who really knew history would not do the
same thing again. It’s as simple as that. A lack of education and a lack of
early knowledge get us into trouble. Be it in good intentions, be it in
goodwill, but that’s not a good enough excuse.

That’s show biz.