Newman helms doc on eccentric RKO filmmaker Hartley

Hartley

"THE AVIATOR" PROTAG Howard Hughes isn't the only eccentric RKO chairman getting feature treatment. Ted Hartley has begun shooting scenes for "Last Tycoon Standing," a documentary directed by Peter Newman.

Hartley, who has owned RKO for the past 11 years with wife Dina Merrill, agreed to the film even as RKO Pictures is in the midst of being sold.

A vet producer, Newman sparked to making a docu when he brokered rights to "Step Into Liquid." He fixed on Hartley, who made a memorable first impression on him when they met on a project.

"I said I'd heard he was a wrestler and he body-slammed me onto a cocktail table," Newman said. "Ted is openly known for outlandish behavior, and when I told buyers in Toronto about this, they all had Ted tales. This might make Ted cool."

Hartley said he took Newman down "because he made a move." But the RKO topper didn't deflect the docu offer, though he knows there's a perception he has underachieved at RKO and lost north of $40 million of his wife's money in averaging a movie a year. Most flopped.

"Some of that's fair, but half that money was mine," said Hartley, who with Merrill bought RKO's remake library from General Tire for $20 million right after Ted Turner bought the RKO film library to fuel his cable networks.

Hartley's road was rougher. General Tire cared so little about old movies and unproduced Orson Welles scripts that vital ownership documents routinely got fed into the furnace when office space got tight. It took years and more than $5 million to restore title on 500-750 of the 1,100 projects.

"We bought a logo and some filing cabinets, but couldn't make a deal for three years," he said. "But we got a seat at the table and a great life experience. We could have spent that money on yachts, airplanes, world travel. Instead, Dina and I saved a brand."

Hartley faults himself for hiring lousy execs who made bad movies. He wishes current production head Thom Mount had gotten there earlier: Five studios are closing RKO remake deals.

"The company is now positioned to be a player," Hartley said.

Newman's pic covers Hartley's rise from Iowa farm boy to Navy flier who, after breaking his back in a crash, became a military liaison at the White House. A stint at Harvard Business School got him into showbiz first on the business side, then as an actor, most notably as Clint Eastwood's nemesis in "High Plains Drifter."

"I was about to do away with Eastwood and a dwarf shot me in the back," Hartley said.

More profound was the impact of his work in the Cary Grant pic "Walk Don't Run." A long forgotten French lover from Hartley's Navy days watched the movie on an airplane, turned to her 10-year-old son and said, "That's your father."

Hartley said the duo surprised him while he was living at the Chateau Marmont. "He was the spitting image of me, and she wanted him educated in America and left him here," said Hartley. "A week later, I bought Stan Laurel's old mansion and became a bachelor father."

Hartley said he's clued Newman in on all his foibles, compiling a top 10 list of stupid things. (Losing $30 million on Internet ventures is close to the top.)

Why so forthcoming, when most studio execs are thin-skinned and loath to admit mistakes?

"The worst this movie can do is say I'm stupid, egotistical or untalented," he said. "Fine. Life is an experiment and I don't want to miss a thing. I've got a great family and I'm not broke and I've done things I'm proud of, too."

One was finding the elusive perfect gift for a woman who has everything. Hartley did that for Merrill when he located the long-lost grave of her financier father, E.F. Hutton.

"Dina's stepmother put him in the ground without a marker, married some British lord and disappeared," said Hartley, who had a tombstone made and presided over a family ceremony.

"DUNCE" CAPPED: Will Ferrell has cleared the decks to star in the Scott Kramer-Steven Soderbergh-scripted "A Confederacy of Dunces" for director David Gordon Green.

So have Drew Barrymore, Lily Tomlin, Mos Def and Olympia Dukakis. Sharon Stone's interested and Larry David's being courted.

But it's back to the drawing board on financing.

Miramax, which paid Paramount $1.5 million for the project several years ago, has quietly bowed out of John Kennedy Toole's novel about a bright portly guy who works hilariously bad jobs and lives with a wacky mom in New Orleans' French Quarter.

Toole committed suicide when he couldn't find a publisher, his mom persevered and the book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and became a campus fave.

"Dunces" has been orphaned by three studios and a flirtation with Warner Bros. has cooled. But the producing confederacy vow to proceed with the same determination as Toole's mother.