Architect of Success

In the dark, drab Chicago flat where he was born and brought up, there was no money for such luxuries as college. But Bill Pereira was ambitious, so he figured out a scheme with his elder brother Harold. Hal got a job as a draftsman, helped pay Bill's way through architectural school. When Bill finally began to prosper, he paid Hal back by taking him on as a partner.

By such single-minded planning, William Leonard Pereira has become, at 37, something of a phenomenon in two different fields: architecture and the movies. In his Los Angeles office, he and a staff of eight are now designing: 1) a $7 1/2 million Beverly Hills medical center; 2) a $1 million experimental theater for Paramount; 3) a studio for RKO; and 4) another hospital, two other theaters, two city-planning projects. All told, their volume of business tops $18 million. Last week, busy Mr. Pereira took on another job. He signed a five-year contract with RKO as a producer (for an undisclosed figure which added substantially to his $75,000-a-year income).

Hurry, Hurry, Hurry! Bill Pereira has always husbanded his time, which is limited to 24 hours a day, at the expense of his energy, which is almost limitless. While attending the University of Illinois, he rationed his time for so many things that he wore himself down from 175 lbs. to 130. To court his wife (they have a nine-year-old son), he allotted himself one Saturday night a month.

Graduating into the Depression, he found he was being paid so little by an architectural firm that he quit to start his own business. He tramped the streets, looking for buildings to remodel. One of them was a Balaban & Katz theater which was planning to spend $5,000 on draperies and upholstery. For the same price Bill remodeled virtually the whole theater. B. & K. was so pleased that it asked him to build a few theaters. Within 18 months, he had a $20,000-a-year business.

He built 75 theaters for B. & K. in the next six years, found his way to Hollywood. Paramount was then planning a $15 million studio, and firms from all over the country were bidding on it. Brash young Bill, who had always been fascinated by big jobs--the more complicated the better --sauntered in and asked: "Do you know what you want?" Said Paramount: "No, do you?"

Bill shook his head. He suggested that he be hired and they'd both find out what Paramount wanted. He got the job and applied his usual pattern to it: five parts research, four parts deduction, one part designing. The functional plans he produced made Paramount ecstatic, brought him offers from other studios as well.

Before designing Beverly Hills' Memorial Medical Center, Pereira placed a standing order with a bookstore for every available book on hospitals, spent $30,000 and 30 months on research, combed through local hospital records, questioned local doctors, studied disease rates and nurse-patient ratios, watched operations and laboratory tests. By the time he was ready to draft his plans, he was a recognized authority on hospital design.

How to Cure Ulcers. In his spare time, Bill dabbled in movies, free lancing from set design to photography (he won an Oscar for trick photography in 1942) and then to producing. Using the same functional approach--i.e., what makes a movie make money, he produced Johnny Angel for $650,000 and From This Day Forward for $1,000,000. Each has already netted $2,000,000.

The reason he shuttles between two such diverse professions (he insists that they have one basic thing in common: "Both begin with an idea on paper") dates back to an old case of stomach ulcers. He thinks they were caused by the tension that arose from the inevitable slack periods in any architect's office. Thanks to his two jobs, Pereira now has something to do all the time. But, says he: "I don't overwork. The guy who plays every other night in the week and golfs on Sundays spends as much time as I do, only I do it at a movie studio." Since he started his second career, his ulcers have not been heard from.

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