May 18 (Bloomberg) -- When President Barack Obama announced his plan to nominate Rocco Landesman as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I figured Margo Lion had a hand in it. So I called her up.

Lion, a Broadway producer, shares an office with Landesman, the loquacious, combative owner of five Broadway houses called Jujamcyn Theaters.

More to the point, she’d joined the Obama bandwagon early, raised more than $500,000 for the candidate and helped shape his arts agenda. She was well-situated to put forward Landesman, 61, for the NEA slot. He’s a brilliant choice.

“The president said, ‘Let’s find a game changer,’” Lion told me. “I didn’t have long-held plans, it wasn’t a strategy. But Rocco’s an unusual leader. He combines an impressive intellect, bravery and humor with a talent for getting the best out of people.”

In the early 1980s, Landesman was part of a loosely affiliated group of producers known as the Young Turks. They were intent on bringing new artists to Broadway without kowtowing to the ancien regime -- the Shubert Organization, which controlled 17 Broadway theaters, and the Nederlanders, who controlled 9.

Then in 1987 Landesman ran into Jujamcyn’s owner, James H. Binger, retired Honeywell Inc. chief executive officer, at the racetrack, of which both were habitues. Binger’s theaters were in trouble and he had recently lost out to Shubert in the competition for “The Phantom of the Opera.” He offered Landesman the chance to revive the franchise.

“We don’t have the prime houses in New York,” Landesman told me at the time, “so obviously, we have to compete in a different way.”

‘Big River’

Until then, I’d known him principally as an ambitious producer, always looking for a fresh angle. He’d courted Roger Miller relentlessly and finally gotten the country-and-western star to agree to write the songs for “Big River,” a musical based on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Jujamcyn competed by beefing up its relationships with nonprofit theaters. That didn’t prevent Landesman from publicly attacking those very theaters for betraying their public trust - - by being in cahoots with commercial producers like Rocco Landesman. He championed the work of David Henry Hwang, August Wilson and Tony Kushner, and the gutsy instincts of producers like Lion.

Cowboy Boots

Shaking things up is in Landesman’s nature. Born in St. Louis and educated at the University of Wisconsin and Yale, he’s been a stock portfolio manager, journalist, literary critic, college teacher and minor league baseball team owner. He was part of a coterie that secretly worked with the Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinski on his novels. He’s known for his red hair, tweed jackets and cowboy boots.

If he’s confirmed, Landesman will succeed Dana Gioia, a former General Foods Corp. executive who, while heading the NEA, once bemoaned America’s cultural “impoverishment” and wondered whether young Americans could name ten artists, intellectuals or academics. (In response, I’d challenged him to pose the same question to his boss, George W. Bush.)

The NEA has never fulfilled its potential to give the U.S. a coherent cultural policy; Landesman might just achieve that.

“So -- am I completely nuts for doing this?” Landesman asked me on more than one occasion, when a project he’d taken on looked like folly. Of course, he already had his answer -- as he undoubtedly does with his latest move onto the national political stage.

I look forward to watching Landesman take on the NEA. His unorthodox talents should serve him -- and us -- well as he becomes the president’s cultural game-changer.

(Jeremy Gerard is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Jeremy Gerard in New York at jgerard2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 18, 2009 00:01 EDT