‘Son of Dracula’ Meets Chilean Miners

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Anyone who wants to turn last year’s saga of the trapped Chilean miners into a movie or book will have to go through Bela G. Lugosi.

The 73-year-old attorney was hired about a month ago by the rights-holding entity created by all 33 miners. As a result, he will negotiate and draft contracts with producers, publishers and anyone else seeking to license their story or book a public appearance.

Lugosi, an attorney in the downtown L.A. office of Arent Fox LLP, knows a thing or two about Hollywood: He’s the son of the classic movie monster actor of the same name, best known for iconic roles in the 1930s as Count Dracula, and later, as a star of Ed Wood’s low-budget cult classics.

As a child, the younger Lugosi would follow his dad around movie sets such as “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” but was warned away from acting. His dad thought actors were too dependent on producers and agents.

“I took my dad’s good advice and stayed out of the talent side of the business,” he said. “For one thing, I didn’t have much.”

Monkey Business

Peter Guber, chief executive of Mandalay Pictures, has a new book out that’s about the power of story telling. And he has a favorite story that was powerful for him.

One evening in the late 1970s, Guber went to a fancy Hollywood dinner with old-timers Cary Grant, Fred Astaire and Jack Warner. After dinner, Warner, the founder of Warner Bros., said, “Peter, you look pooped, perplexed and passionless.”

Guber, now 69, agreed. At the time, he was running Columbia Pictures. All day people came to him with problems to solve, leaving him exhausted and angry.

Warner told him: “You’re a zoo keeper. Everybody who comes to you brings a monkey – a problem to give you. If you don’t protect yourself, you’ll be in the monkey business.”

Warner advised him to tell people that when they bring him a problem, they need to bring possible solutions, too.

That one story turned around Guber’s career.

“I’ve passed that story on to C-suite executives and entrepreneurs, and they all found it powerful,” Guber said.

Guber’s book, “Tell to Win,” was published March 1.

Mistaken Identity

Imagine you’re hosting a fancy awards luncheon in a huge ballroom at the JW Marriott at L.A. Live. The lights go dim and a well-produced video comes up. It is a backgrounder about the next awardee. But to your horror, you realize it’s the wrong video. Meanwhile, the technical people realize their error, so they stop the video in the middle of a sentence. They turn up the lights. There’s silence in the audience of 900. What would you say?

Jane Pak, the chief executive of Nawbo-LA, had that experience March 4. She was offstage when she realized the wrong video was playing, “and next thing I knew, I had an empty stage, a stopped video, no comments prepared and a room full of slightly confused people,” she recalled.

She walked across the stage and when she reached the lectern, she said, “Well, I guess we all know what snafu means.”

The occasion was Nawbo-LA’s annual Leadership and Legacy Awards, in which the group, National Association of Women Business Owners, gives awards to local standouts. The misplayed video was about Wina So Tran, the chief executive of Solstice Medicine Co. in Glendale, who was named Rising Star of the Year. When the video about her was played a second time – in the correct time slot – Nawbo-LA’s president, Madelyn Alfano, joked that the video was so nice, they played it twice.

Staff reporters Alfred Lee and Joel Russell contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].

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