Joe Unchained

Behind every successful man, as any Hollywood script writer knows, there must be a little woman. Behind Joseph Levine there is Mrs. Levine. If it were not for her, he might have stayed in the restaurant business in Boston, but Rosalie, a onetime vocalist with Rudy Vallee's band, did not like restaurants, so Joe bought up the rights to seven Hollywood westerns and became a movie distributor. Nowadays Rosalie is just as important: when Levine needs a gadget to promote one of his pictures--4,000 small rubber bombs to advertise Hercules, or 5,000 genie lamps to push the forthcoming The Wonders of Aladdin--Mrs. Levine gets busy in her own Newton Centre, Mass., workshop. With such help, plus his own shrewd eye for mass entertainment, Joe Levine has emerged as an energy-charged captain in an industry full of spent majors. The new Hollywood is apt to forget the old rules, and says Levine with a Barnum air, "we are reminding everyone that this is a circus business."

Up in Smoke. Using a method that has helped change the pattern of U.S. film distribution, Showman Levine circulates his pictures by saturation. After an initial advertising barrage he opens a film in as many as 600 theaters at once, nearly twice the number Hollywood has traditionally used for major releases. The film that put the Levine system on the international map was 1959's Hercules, an Italian-made potboiler. He bought the U.S. rights for $120,000 and promoted the film with well over $1,000,000; it took in $18 million at the box office. Levine has more or less repeated the pattern with such films as Jack the Ripper and Hercules Unchained.

A prosperous but unspectacular distributor only a few years ago, Levine expects to gross about $20 million in 1961. As he announced to the world in 49 pages of Variety, he has seven pictures ready to be released, two more before the cameras, including Morgan the Pirate, for which he is planning to bury $10,000 under Atlantic beaches and to invite all poor slobs with shovels to hunt the treasure. Drawing on the specialties of an aircraft company and a rug-weaving firm, he will produce a flying carpet that will bombard the world with sultanic adjectives describing Aladdin.

To sell Hercules Unchained last year, Levine threw an outdoor party at Hollywood's Beverly Hills Hotel, where Chanel No. 5 came spraying from the bushes every 30 seconds and a solid-ice Hercules stood melting in the Southern California heat, with colored electric light bulbs frozen into his muscles. Earlier a 4-lb. Hercules made of chocolate landed on 700 desks ; one newsman carelessly left his in the sun, said that when he retrieved it, it looked like Joe Levine.

Branching Out. Well under 5 ft. 5 in., and weighing 200 lbs., wearing a rose-gold watch, dark suits and French cuffs, Joe Levine at 55 suggests a sort of low-ceilinged Harry Golden. He is low-key, as well -- a surprisingly quiet businessman who was born in a Boston slum, learned about money and gambling from his tailor stepfather, "who made $4 a week and liked to play poker." He quit school at 14, became a drummer for a dress company, in seven years had a small chain of suburban retail dress stores, in partner ship with an older brother. Drifting on, he lost $75,000 in the stock market, taught driving to the novice customers of a Bronx Chevrolet dealer, sold religious statuettes to the followers of Harlem Evangelist Daddy Grace, drove an ambulance for one day and was fired because several passengers all but expired while he searched for the hospitals of the unfamiliar city.

After he went into the movie business, he came across a smash sex-hygiene film called Body Beautiful. "It made me sick," he remembers. "So I bought it." He usually dealt in pictures produced by others, before he finally started producing movies on his own. His pictures are low-level entertainment, but Joe Levine is unpretentious enough to know it--unlike many a Hollywood producer who claims to be dealing in culture. Levine, however, has left "God, sex, and spectacle" films long enough to commission a suburban comedy of manners from Marion (Private) Hargrove and has also bought an art film, Alberto Moravia's Two Women. As a result, some of his admirers fear that he is going to give up the drum and take up the lute. But with The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah now shooting in Morocco, Joe seems in no danger. One of his current concerns, in fact, is how to publicize that movie: Mrs. Levine, he thinks, might perhaps whip up some tasteful, monogrammed pillars of salt.

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