It took two years on the market and, in the end, he settled for 25% less than the final asking price of $52 million, not to mention an astonishing 33% less than the original, pie-in-the-sky $57.5 million price tag, famously flamboyant super-producer Joel Silver at long last sold his residence on Malibu’s Carbon Beach for $38 million. Despite the steep discount, Silver, whose blockbuster action films include the money minting “Matrix” and “Lethal Weapon” film series, none-the-less still pocketed an enviable fortune on the sale of the property he picked up nearly 15 years ago from late “Rocky” franchise producer Robert Chartoff for $14.375 million. Situated on close to three-quarters of an acre with more than 130-feet of prime, bulkheaded beach frontage, the approximately 5,900-square-foot main house contains five bedrooms and six bathrooms and a detached guesthouse provides another two bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Secured gates set into a towering, curved brick wall hide from the street a serene, tree-shaded courtyard with gurgling water feature and crimson double doors set into a two-story wall of glass. Sophisticated yet casually comfortable interior spaces are furnished in vibrant jewel tones and include a cavernous double-height living room with a glossy deep brown hardwoods, a TV-surmounted white brick fireplace and a soaring wall of glass with an over-the-swimming pool view of the ocean. The sky light topped dining room offers a sunken wet bar and a fireplace and the kitchen, with a hexagonal terra-cotta floor tiles, a butcher-block topped center island and up-to-date appliances, opens to an informal dining area and a cozily proportioned family room with another TV-surmounted fireplace plus a cushioned, ocean-facing window seat. Upstairs, a den/office with a fourth fireplace overlooks the living room while the elegantly proportioned master suite is plenty roomy enough to include a spacious sitting area and features an exposed beam ceiling and a room-wide wall of glass doors that slide open to a slender veranda with built-in ceiling heaters and panoramic beach, ocean and coastline views.
A tennis court, the only ocean-front tennis court on Carbon Beach, according to marketing materials, sits along the side of the house and a vast red brick terrace runs the full width of the property along the beach with a dark bottom swimming pool, spa a couple of tented pavilion patios for shaded lounging.
With a well-known penchant for a spendy lifestyle — his wife, Karen, has a convertible Rolls Royce painted Laker purple, the polemical producer, with a couple of handfuls of projects in his hopper including “SuperFly,” a remake of the 1972 blaxploitation movie “Super Fly,” still owns a 22,000-plus-square-foot, knoll-topping mansion with, according to tax records, eight bedrooms and thirteen bathrooms on not quite four acres in a coveted corner of L.A.’s Brentwood area. Since the mid 1980s the Silvers have also owned Auldbrass, a spectacular 330-acre spread in South Carolina’s picturesque low country with a painstakingly restored assemblage of low-slung and slope-walled structures designed in the 1940s by Frank Lloyd Wright for Michigan industrial consultant C. Leigh Stevens. The Silvers maintain Auldbrass as a private estate but make it available for limited public tours every two years with proceeds benefitting the Beaufort County Open Land Trust.
Listing photos: Hilton & Hyland
