Hollywood a good investment?

When compared to Wall Street, real estate and the art market, well, sort of. Everything else has gotten to be such a mess that showbiz is considered relatively safe - or at least safer. That’s what Jana Eselbaum is telling the NYT. “My company is outperforming almost everything,’” says the co-founder of an independent financing and production company called iDeal Partners Film Fund.

Now three years old, iDeal operates out of New York, with financing to make about eight movies. It manages risk to investors through a variety of routes: preselling its films to foreign distributors, casting commercially tested actors, taking advantage of state tax incentives for filming. With that approach, Ms. Edelbaum at the outset was able to promise her investors a risk floor of 70 percent on the chance that none of iDeal’s films succeeded. But as iDeal rounds the home stretch on its first batch of movies, Ms. Edelbaum is projecting at least a 15 percent return for her investors and — if something big happens with “Motherhood” or “Arlen Faber” — as much as 40 percent.

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Anybody making the Hollywood-is-safer argument just six months ago would have been laughed out of town. Complex accounting methods, tremendous competition, soaring costs — it wasn’t exactly a safe part of the woods for even the most sophisticated investor. All of that terrain is still intact, of course, but compare it with imploding investment banks, plunging real estate prices, a whipsawing stock market, Warhols sitting unsold and Bernard Madoff.