Features November 11, 2010, 5:00PM EST

A Pistachio Farmer, Pom Wonderful, and the FTC

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What would happen to Paramount if the environmentalists were to prevail and it loses the water bank, the war chest it has deployed to such great effect for the past 15 years? "I don't know how we could lose it," Resnick says. "We bought it. We own it." Without a reasonably priced supply of water, of course, Resnick could find his domination of the pistachio market compromised.

When a metal shaker clamps on to a pistachio tree, the ground shakes. There's a draft of air, and in one violent burst close to 150 pounds of nuts come flying off the branches into a huge catcher. The whole thing lasts five seconds. This year, Paramount has had 100 of these machines operating day and night for eight weeks.

"It's hard to believe those fields. When you fly over the west side [of the Valley], as far you can see it's basically all our property," says Resnick, who sometimes enjoys the view from his own plane. The orchards lie about 60 miles north of the water bank. "I first bought some land in the late 1970s as a hedge against inflation," he says. It could have been a suburban office park for all he cared. "I thought I'd buy a piece of land for my kids, and hopefully it would go up in value." (The Resnicks have five children from previous marriages, but none together.)

Stewart grew up in New Jersey and came west with his family during California's golden age in the 1950s. He was at UCLA when his father lost everything. "He was a very smart guy, but he was an alcoholic and a compulsive gambler," says Resnick. "Other than that, he didn't have any vices." He laughs. "My father was a great example of what not to do, quite honestly. He had been middle-class, he had a local bar, and then he was poor. I realized I didn't want to go backwards." Resnick started his first business, a janitorial services company, while in law school and sold it in 1969.

Soon after, he married Lynda, his second wife. They met when she made an advertising pitch for a small business he had invested in. She had grown up a child of privilege on the East Coast; her father later moved the family to Los Angeles and achieved some fame as the producer of the cult classic The Blob. Lynda had been on television as a kid and considered becoming an artist, but instead started her own ad agency at age 19. As she likes to say of her first encounter with Stewart, "I never got the account. But I sure got the business."

The Resnicks began buying companies, starting with Teleflora, which they built into the nation's largest flower delivery service and then, in 1985, the Franklin Mint, purveyor of commemorative coins and other kitsch. Both were good matches for Lynda's marketing skills. She famously paid $211,000 for Jackie Kennedy's fake pearls, and then the Mint went on to sell $26 million worth of replicas. More notoriously, in 1998 the Mint was sued by The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund for selling unauthorized dolls; the Mint won and then accused the Fund's lawyers of malicious prosecution. The case is still in the courts. Meanwhile, the Resnicks sold the Mint in 2006, after eBay had (EBAY) begun taking its business away.

In the mid-1980s, they expanded their land holdings significantly, and cheaply, by buying orchards that Superior and Getty Oil were unloading. Now they had oranges, pomegranates, almonds, and pistachios. Lots and lots of pistachios. "We had enough that we could be the market leader," Resnick says. "Our intent was always to be the leader."

California and Iran are the two major pistachio producers in the world. In Iran, farmers have been planting the trees, which take nearly six years to produce a commercial crop, for centuries. In California, they had been doing so on a small scale for just a few decades. Resnick saw an unlikely opportunity: a relatively new American industry that he could shape into a global competitor.