Who

Doumanian is a television and film producer best known for financing a slew of Woody Allen movies. She's also the romantic partner of banking billionaire Jacqui Safra.

Backstory

Jean Karabas grew up Greek Orthodox in Chicago, the daughter of a restaurant owner. She dropped out of college to marry her first husband, music promoter John Doumanian, and became buddies with Woody Allen in the mid-60s. But she didn't go to work with Allen immediately. During the late 1960s, she worked as a writer on the Dick Cavett Show, and in the '70s as an associate producer for Howard Cosell's show. In 1975, Doumanian joined NBC as a talent booker on Saturday Night Live and was tapped to be the executive producer when creator Lorne Michaels temporarily exited in 1980. Doumanian's stint at SNL was an unmitigated disaster: The all-new cast she hired—led by notorious non-talents like Charlie Rocket, Denny Dillon, and Joe Piscopo—made episodes now widely regarded as the most apocalyptically unfunny in the show's history. Forced out of the SNL job after just one season, Doumanian laid low for the balance of the 1980s. (Michaels eventually returned in 1985.) She resurfaced in the 1990s when, with the financial backing of her boyfriend, banking heir Jacqui Safra, she produced seven Woody Allen movies, including Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Everyone Says I Love You, and Deconstructing Harry, as well as a number of non-Allen films and the occasional theater production such as the recent August: Osage County.

Drama

The Doumanian-Allen partnership imploded in 2001 when Allen accused Doumanian and Safra of cheating him out of $12 million in profits. They countered that Allen had gypped them to the tune of $19 million. In 2003 the two sides settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Personal

Doumanian's longtime companion, Jacqui Safra, is a scion of the Lebanese Jewish banking family. (He's the nephew of Edmund Safra, the banker famously murdered by his male nurse in 1999.) Doumanian and Safra made real estate headlines in 2006 when they sold their Upper East Side townhouse to hotshot banker J. Christopher Flowers for a record-shattering $53 million; they later bought a penthouse duplex on East 88th Street.

True story

In 2003, Doumanian gave a talk at the Learning Annex called "Learn How to Get Your Play or Movie Produced." Unfortunately for the peeved attendees, she didn't provide any actual information. Doumanian recommended that playwrights find well-known producers for their plays, and suggested locating these producers "on the Internet. I don't know how to go about that myself."