(2 of 2)
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.