Meet the man connecting Hollywood and Bollywood

See correction below

By Omar Shamout

Daily Journal Staff Writer

LOS ANGELES - Clawing your way into the elite ranks of Hollywood power lawyers requires ambition, brains, and a Teflon-like exterior. It's a tall order by any estimate, but that isn't enough for Arnold P. Peter of Peter Law Group. Not content with his role as a high-stakes dealmaker in the entertainment capital of the world, Peter set his sights on bridging the divide between Hollywood and Bollywood as both a business executive and film producer.

Peter's career represents a convergence of the legal and creative worlds - he's giving script notes to a writer one minute and is negotiating an employment contract for a studio head the next.

"A lot of the businesses I'm involved in are really clients who came looking for legal work," Peter said recently over breakfast at Il Fornaio in Beverly Hills, a short walk from his Wilshire Boulevard office, "and realized I had some business acumen."

Peter estimated that about a third of his firm's income stems from helping clients run their entertainment businesses in a nonlegal capacity. He's even set up a separate shingle, Media Partners Global LLC, to delineate between his consulting services and the litigation and transactional work he and the six other attorneys at his firm provide.

Peter gained much of that knowledge and know-how while serving as the as director of labor relations and later as vice president of legal and business affairs for Universal Studios' theme park division. During that time, he helped oversee the expansion of the Universal CityWalk entertainment and shopping district and the opening of Universal Studios Japan.

"I gained a lot of insight into how a business is run," Peter said of his time at the Lew Wasserman-led studio, where he worked with guilds and managed profit margins and labor costs.

Having spent half his childhood in Los Angeles, Peter graduated from Loyola Law School in 1984 and headed east, spending seven years as an associate in banking and securities at the venerable Wall Street firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP.

A chance meeting with a labor arbitrator on a flight back to Los Angeles got him an introduction for a job at Universal. After a five-year tenure there, he built an entertainment transactional practice - first at Littler Mendelson PC, then as the chair of the entertainment and media practice at Lord Bissell & Brook (now Locke Lord LLP), and finally running the small firm Peter, Rubin & Simon LLP before founding Peter Law Group in 2009.

Soon after starting his own firm, Peter began doling out more than just legal advice. He continues to counsel entertainment companies on business strategy, particularly Bollywood studios and financiers looking to branch out into the American market.

That includes the U.S. division of Yash Raj Films, or YRF Entertainment, India's most prolific and iconic film studio. The top brass in India asked Peter to serve as the fledgling company's interim president, which he did during 2012 and 2013.

While running YRF, Peter produced the film "The Longest Week," a dark comedy starring Jason Bateman, Olivia Wilde and Billy Crudup, which he said has garnered several distribution offers.

The Weinstein Company, known for such recent awards darlings as "Silver Linings Playbook" and "The King's Speech," recently bought another YRF project, "Grace of Monaco," starring Nicole Kidman, which is slated for worldwide release in March.

Though he's no longer serving as interim president, Peter still handles legal work for YRF. His firm handled all production matters for "Dhoom 3," an action movie shot in Chicago that this week became the highest grossing Bollywood film in the U.S. and raked in over $25 million worldwide in its opening weekend. He also closed a deal to make "Dhoom 3" the first Indian-language film to be shot and shown in IMAX.

Peter put together a $10 million financing deal for A-list Bollywood producer and director Vinod Chopra's first English-language film, called "Broken Horses" and starring Anton Yelchin and Vincent D'Onofrio. Former Reed Smith LLP attorney Chetan Devaskar represented the investor, and he said Peter actively made business decisions on Chopra's behalf.

"He was certainly very involved," said Devaskar, who is now the general counsel for production company Treehouse Pictures. "His firm had been given the authority to negotiate the deal from start to finish."

Though he lived in India until he was 12 years old, Peter said he had to forge connections within its film industry on his own. When "Slumdog Millionaire" brought Indian culture to international prominence five years ago, Peter traveled to the country and met with top Indian producers in an effort to strike while the iron was hot. Simultaneously, he broadened his network of contacts in Hollywood and India while serving as board chairman of the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles between 2008 and 2012.

"I gained credibility as someone who could not only provide legal advice," Peter said, "but I could also open doors. I could make introductions, bring deals to them and help facilitate business transactions."

Peter began working with Indian clients flush with capital and eager to try their hand at making Hollywood-style movies with American actors for global audiences. He recognized quickly that he could offer a useful service to filmmakers conditioned to making movies without the type of regulation found in the U.S.

"A lot of the financing sources were often dubious," Peter explained about Bollywood productions. "There are no unions. I've been on sets in India where the payroll arrives in cash in a suitcase."

But he's got clients closer to home as well.

Peter's longtime friend and client Mark A. Lund said the attorney offered invaluable assistance while he wrote and directed his first feature film, the futuristic courtroom thriller "Justice Is Mind." Peter produced the low-budget independent film, which cost less than $25,000 to make, and sponsored its Los Angeles premiere in November.

"Creative types need someone like Arnold," said Lund, magazine publisher. "He's got that expertise where if he doesn't know the answer to something, he can introduce you to someone who does."

Lund added that Peter served as a legal consultant on the script, ensuring that the film's courtroom scenes rang true. Once the film was finished, Peter also coordinated a screening at a university to get the word out about the movie. Peter also has ambitions to bring the film to law schools in the United Kingdom and India.

While showing the film to lawyers and executives is great, Peter said having his name up on the big screen has gained him an even more important set of fans.

"That's when your kids think you're cool," Peter laughed. "Prior to that, they don't really care."

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Mark Lund, executive producer of the film "Justice in Mind" is a former professional figure skater. Lund starred as a judge on Fox's "Skating with Celebrities" and was a TV news commentator during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. The story also incorrectly reported that lawyer Arnold Peter, who carries a producer credit on "Justice in Mind," facilitated screenings of the film on several university campuses. In fact, Mr. Peter arranged one screening at a university. In addition, the story may have given the misimpression that Peter was the executive producer of "Justice in Mind". He was not. The Daily Journal regrets the errors.