The Hollywood Producer Behind Bryan Singer’s Stalled Movie
LOS ANGELES—He got his start in the movies as a theater projectionist in South Africa, and later managed the first drive-in in his native Israel. The Hollywood Reporter once dubbed him the low-budget “King of the B’s” and “The Most Unlikely Movie Mogul.” He is so frugal, a filmmaker who worked with him recalls, that he once suggested an Oscar-winning movie star like Diane Keaton should drive herself to and from a location shoot in a budget rental car.
Eighteen months ago, a deal to sell a majority stake in his company to a Chinese holding company collapsed, and only last month Deadline reported that it would receive a cash infusion of undisclosed size from the Russian energy oligarch Andrey Georgiev. His flattering profile on IMDb reads as if he wrote it himself.
He is Avinoam “Avi” Lerner, the pugnacious 71-year-old producer whose Millennium Films is behind and the reboots of Sylvester Stallone’s , and at the moment he is the subject of a flood of atypically unwelcome publicity. That’s because, Bryan Singer, the director of and several of the movies, after a years-long string of allegations was —allegations of sexual misconduct by Singer against teenage boys.
