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For people who talk about film as art, IVAN REITMAN may be a bit hard to take. A Czech Jewish refugee, at 43 he has made more money making movies than most people ever dream of. Box-office success is his trademark. Film.
IVAN REITMAN went to jail for a film he made at college. Now he's one of the top producer-directors in Hollywood, second only to Steven Spielberg in box-office revenues over the past decade with megahits like Ghostbusters and Twins.
He actually began his career at the precocious age of three in his native Czechoslovakia, putting on puppet shows and circuses for the neighborhood kids. "So I guess I was destined early on to do this kind of work," he grins.
He looks younger than his 43 years. His voice is deep and rich and his dark brown eyes are full of humor. He was listed in the 1990 Survival Guide to Films as the director of the "most consecutive box-office successes" ever since 1979's Meatballs, but he dresses more like a struggling young artist than a millionaire.
He was in Toronto on a brief family visit, avoiding the press which dotes on him when it isn't sniping. But he agreed to make a kindly exception. Dressed in scruffy charcoal-grey pants and sleeveless wool cardigan over a plaid shirt, he tucked his long, slightly bulgy frame into a corner of an elegant tearoom, and said there wouldn't be a sequel to Twins. But he has plucked the larger of those unlikely siblings out of that runaway hit to team him with co-stars even shorter than Danny DeVito, in his new film, Kindergarten Cop.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is playing an undercover cop who becomes a substitute kindergarten teacher in a small town "because he knows a bad person is coming to harm one of the kids in the class," explains Reitman. "The film is funny and moving and stars Arnold with a bunch of six-year-old kids." The thought obviously delights him.
So do most of his films. He relies strictly on his own instinct and tastes, which have uncannily mirrored those of movie audiences. From the beginning, his aim has been to entertain. He had made excursions into "more serious" films like Legal Eagles, co-starring...