After making billions for municipal-bond investors, Jim Lebenthal is finally doing what he really loves – running a video Web site.
The 73-year-old chairman of Lebenthal & Co. packs up his digital camera crew and slips out of his office regularly these days in search of odd Big Apple vignettes for his week-old Web site.
One video satirized cell phone users. Another he’s shooting this weekend is about people “walking around drinking from water bottles like little babies.”
The Web site, CrazyAboutNewYork.com, isn’t likely to go under the way other money-starved sites have perished.
Lebenthal has put his financial muscle behind it, but he doesn’t monitor the visits by surfers.
“I don’t even want to know,” Lebenthal said.
The energetic bond titan pursues his video material with the same fervor he used for four decades to build his family’s business into a financial powerhouse.
And like any worthy Wall Street veteran, he’s also getting a huge bang from his bucks, considering how Web sites notoriously burn through millions.
“Other people have their dachas in the Hamptons; I have my Web site. It’s only cost me $75,000 to get it up and running.”
Lebenthal, who was an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and Life magazine correspondent before be became Wall Street’s muni-bond wizard, says he’s ecstatic with his new second job.
“I love seeing the world through a viewfinder. I get so excited my eye sweats and fogs up the ‘finder.”
He says he isn’t a crusader for causes but is basically a humorist. “It tends to be college humor, visual gags, poking light-hearted fun.”
Lebenthal says no one complains when he puts aside his “Modern Portfolio Theory” reports to clients to run out with his video crew.
“At age 73 I have a certain license. If I wanted to play golf, nobody would fault me for doing it, so instead I do my man-on-the-street thing.
“It’s a well-earned right. I’ve put in my time.”
His daughter Alexandra has been running the company for six years, leaving the marketing and advertising to her father.
Lebenthal went to work just out of Princeton as a Hollywood correspondent at Life magazine, where he had sold photos while still an undergraduate.
He switched to the budding world of television, working as a producer at a couple of TV stations in California and at NBC before making an independent short, “Tumbleweed,” in 1947 that was nominated for an Academy Award.
Walt Disney hired him for a time.
Lebenthal, tired of television’s rat race, joined the family business in 1962.