It may be the oddest pairing in Hollywood since Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger played twin brothers in a movie.
In a deal that even Tinseltown might have trouble coming up with, the middle son of Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi is shelling out $100 million to finance a film production company run by a Jewish guy from New Jersey.
The cash injection by 36-year-old Al-Saadi Gadhafi into Mathew Beckerman’s Los Angeles-based company Natural Selection will go toward financing 20 films.
For Beckerman, 35, who is Natural Selection’s CEO, the deal will go a long way toward his goal of producing what he has called mid-range films that he argues have gotten lost as Hollywood concentrates on box-office blockbusters and indie studios stumble.
Meanwhile, from Gadhafi’s standpoint, it’s all about the movies.
Gadhafi “loves movies and has seen ‘Lost’ 30 times,” Beckerman told entertainment Web site TheWrap.com, which first reported the story. A part-time professional soccer player and full-time entrepreneur, Gadhafi has several business interests in Libya, which seeks to invest in Western films. He has also been the champion of the creation of a new city in his homeland that would be a banking and high-tech mecca which he has promised would exercise religious tolerance and embrace Western business practices.
Despite Gadhafi’s apparent fondness for the West, Beckerman acknowledged that having him as an investor has raised some eyebrows. Indeed, even though the elder Gadhafi has apologized for the 1988 terrorist bombing of a Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, and even though the United Nations has lifted sanctions against the country, the name still fills some with dread.