King of the Geezer Teasers

Inside Randall Emmett’s direct-to- video empire, where many of Hollywood’s most bankable stars have found lucrative early retirement.

- Joshua Hunt

ON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13, Randall Emmett presided over a crime scene near one of America’s few tropical rain forests in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico. Robert De Niro, dressed as a small-town Georgia sheriff, emerged from a sun-faded mobile home and walked solemnly past a black van marked coroner, looking like a man uneasy about the ordeal ahead of him. In Wash Me in the River, the feature film Emmett had just started shooting, that ordeal was to pursue a recovering opioid addict exacting revenge on the drug dealers he holds responsible for his fiancée’s death. Off-camera, De Niro’s ordeal was no less daunting—somehow, the great actor had to keep Hollywood’s worst filmmaker from ruining the movie they’d set out to make together.