The Business of Film: Kingmakers

The old stereotype for a Hollywood producer was a self-important, arrogant, cigar-toting autocrat. These obnoxious power mongers were charming only when they needed to be. They tended to have an elusive relationship with the truth and a far more intimate one with the dollar. They liked big, simple, and sexy; not small, quirky or complex. These days, though, producers come in all shapes and sizes, genders and nationalities. They aren't all looking for the next blockbuster - some hear the word "huge" and run in the opposite direction.

Some are big. Their films make more money than many countries.

Some are simply the best. Their films will never gross a billion worldwide, spawn action figures or become the face on the side of that 2-gallon cup of soda that comes with your child's Happy Meal. These producers sometimes even win Oscars, sometimes make back the cost of their films - but not often. Why not? They want to make movies that matter, because they believe that movies do matter.

Moving Pictures Magazine set out recently to identify the newest generation of producers who dominate filmmaking today. Some have been around for decades, others are relatively new to the game. You'll undoubtedly recognize the films they've produced. You'll probably be spitting with anger at some of our selections, and nod in agreement at others. The way we chose was in the time-honored Hollywood tradition: we went with our gut. (Then we cleared our picks with the boss, did market research, and replaced three of the most obscure names with two popular actors and a kid's film producer to make the list more demographically appealing, likeable and upbeat).

Hollywood's got an appetite for a lot of different types of films and, contrary to popular belief, embraces as many small films as it slobbers over the big, big ones.

Tim Bevans started out as a production runner on a Kiwi soap opera called Close to Home. Eric Fellner started out in London, making music promos for Duran Duran. Avi Arad designed toys that Marvel thought so highly of, they bought out his business. Drew Barrymore started out playing the little sister on ET. Ice Cube started out playing a gang member in Boyz n the Hood and rapping in the group NWA. Steve Jobs started Apple Computers.

Avi Arad might produce more billion-dollar babies than anyone making movies today, but is a self-professed comic book geek at heart. The 55-year-old CEO of Marvel Studios, an Israeli whose parents were exiled Polish Jews, grew up like a lot of lonely guys: lost in the heroic adventures of his favorite Marvel Comics characters - the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the Hulk. Where his story departs from that of the rest of us is that, 40 years later, Arad runs Marvel Studios, the TV-film production arm of the Marvel brand.

When Arad took over Marvel Studios, in the early 1990s, it was a bankrupt mess. Movie studios at the time weren't too interested in the brand name potential of Marvel Comics characters. When asked about those early days, Arad told the website filmforce.ign.com that the studios' reaction to his early pitches was, "Polite. Skeptical. Couldn't figure out how to make these movies. Obviously, CGI [computer-generated images] in the last 10 years has gone through such leaps and bounds that, today, people are looking for these kinds of movies to wow audiences with technology."

Marvel needed a hit. They got one with Blade. Soon CGI caught up with the imaginations of the Marvel animation artists, and the place boomed. Result: Marvel Studios has produced nearly a dozen number-one-grossing films, most recently Spider-Man 2, which most critics felt was a substantial improvement upon the original Spider-Man - not bad, considering the first one received strong reviews and grossed $820 million worldwide.

Arad sees his role as being the protector of all those Marvel characters' integrity as they make the sometimes-difficult transition from the page (and imagination of young boys) to the screen. For example, one early draft of Spider-Man contained a scene in which Spidey cuts the throat of a villain. Arad insisted that Spider-Man never kills anyone, and his will won out.

For every producer like Avi Arad, there is another kind of producer who makes the sort of films that have the un-Marvel characters, hobbits, and wizards who crowd our cineplexes every holiday season. These producers tend to live in New York City. They cluster at the café at the Angelica Film Center, or bump into one another in the middle of the afternoon of some Richard Widmark film noir retrospective at Film Forum on Houston Street. These films frequently end up at Sundance, where Robert Redford proclaims them to be the future of film - and quite often, Redford's right. Once in a while, one of these difficult films even surfaces at the Academy Awards, such as the year Boys Don't Cry won Hilary Swank a Best Actress Oscar.

The one thing many of these films seem to share is that they are the result of the labors of Christine Vachon's Killer Films. For over a decade, starting with Todd Hayne's Poison, Vachon has been the queen of the lean, mean, brooding indie. She seems to possess an incredible knack for finding tough, somewhat uncommercial material, then locating financing and talent that allow these films to get made. A lot of the people in Vachon's films are gay, and not the Nathan Lane-kooky-neighbor variety, either. "I resent the idea that we're all brothers and sisters because of who we sleep with," Vachon told the website indiewire.com. "That's so stupid. I get slammed constantly by the gay community, by the lesbian community, for making too many gay movies, or not making enough, or not making lesbian movies."

Not to suggest that all the best indie producers live among the canyons of Manhattan. Los Angeles is full of small, quirky producers who nurture tough projects into interesting films as well. Take Michael London, for example. A few years ago, he produced The Guru, a curious blend of Bollywood and Hollywood starring Heather Graham and Marisa Tomei. The Guru didn't do too well, but London was undeterred. Last year, he produced Thirteen and House of Sand and Fog, both made for less than $20 million and both recipients of high critical praise. This year, London's latest is Sideways, the new road movie by About Schmidt director Alexander Payne. The film stars Paul Giametti - not exactly anyone's idea of a leading man, unless you go for a guy who's short, bald, 40-something and bummed out - and has generated a lot of early Oscar buzz. "It's hard to convince people that there are movies made without movie stars," London told the website www.indiewood.com in a recent interview. " No one wants to embrace what's unique about most indie films: In the middle zone of budgets under $15 million-$20 million, there's so much opportunity to make movies with a personal voice and yet reach a sizable audience."

London, meanwhile, recently inked a deal with Paramount to produce films for them. It's not the lobby of Film Forum on a Wednesday afternoon in February, but this under-the-radar producer appears set to start enjoying his 15 minutes any minute now.

John Lasseter and Steve Jobs are two of the driving forces behind Pixar Animation, the Emeryville, California-based, digital animation studio that has effectively supplanted Disney as the number one maker of kid's movies in the world today. Lasseter has been earning a living animating reality ever since he won $15 from the Model Grocery Market in Whittier, California, for a drawing he made of the Headless Horseman. These days, Lasseter directs some - Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life and the upcoming Cars - and produces others - Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and the recently released The Incredibles - while Jobs makes the deals that have made Pixar one of the hottest commodities in the film world. The truth is that Pixar, more than any of the L.A.-based studios, seems driven more by a dotcom mentality that emphasizes collaborative effort than more traditional studios, which are as hierarchical as an organization gets. Pixar isn't afraid to put substantial amounts of time, manpower and money into development before they ever shoot a page of script, and since they never need to worry too much about the schedules of movie stars (although movie stars love to lend their voices to Pixar films), they are pretty much free to make their films on their own timeline. Remarkably, every Pixar film has been a hit. They're so successful, it's scary. Maybe what drove Disney CEO Michael Eisner to break off a deal with Pixar this spring, after the two companies had enjoyed astonishing success over the first term of their partnership (Pixar produces, Disney distributes and markets) was that Eisner found himself staring into the face of the future of children's entertainment, and it wasn't him - it was Buzz Lightyear.

Drew Barrymore is not a comic book geek; she's a movie star. Like the very best movie stars, she has the ability to recreate herself, and in recent years has emerged as one of the top young producers in town. Her production company, Flower Films, started out with Never Been Kissed in 1999. Flower also produced Charlie's Angels and Charlie 2: Full Throttle, two of the largest-budget action films to feature female heroes. This year, just to prove you can't pin her down, Barrymore is producing two new projects: Fever Pitch, an adaptation of Nick Hornby's book about obsessive soccer fans that has been rewritten as a film (starring Barrymore and Saturday Night Live alumnus Jimmy Fallon) about obsessive Boston Red Sox fans. Barrymore also produced the MTV documentary about voting, Choose or Lose: A Great Place to Start, which explores political issues and features Barrymore, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and a number of other politically-inclined talking heads. (If she keeps up this pace, Marvel Studios may end up making an action adventure film called Being Drew Barrymore.)

Ice Cube looks less like a gang member and more like someone's big brother, but he burst into the national consciousness playing a gang member in John Singleton's 1991 film Boyz n the Hood. After a decade spent acting and rapping, Ice Cube grew weary of playing the same sort of urban underworld roles the movies seem to have reserved for its African American males. But he didn't quit in disgust - instead, he launched his career as a producer, where he has rapidly become the leading maker of a new sort of film: the feel-good, urban crossover comedy that always hits its demographic base but also has across-the-board box office appeal. In the case of Barbershop 2, it spent its opening weekend as the number-one-grossing film in America. Ice Cube's films are about community, the tensions that tear communities apart and the ties that bind them together. Cube has insisted he hasn't created anything but is merely following in the footsteps of his elders. "I can't take credit for starting the trend," he told the website blackfilm.com. "We started doing our movies off of what brothers were doing in the ‘70s. Really, the style for Friday came directly from the Sidney Poitier/Bill Cosby movies like Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again. The idea came from an era that I grew up in which produced movies like Car Wash." Wherever his influences come from, Ice Cube has become the Frank Capra of the 21^st century.

Both Ice Cube and Drew Barrymore, wittingly or unwittingly, are creating whole new genres of films that no one thought worth making before. Girl power and urban ensemble comedies barely existed on Hollywood's radar before Barrymore and Cube came along, and now they're taken for granted as genres - even as Barrymore herself continues to be derided as the nitwit who flashed her boobs at David Letterman. Some nitwit.

Tim Bevans and Eric Fellner of Working Title films are the Merchant and Ivory of the contemporary British, adult romantic comedy. You know those films that tend to star Hugh Grant (Four Weddings, About a Boy, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones Diary,  Love Actually), come out once or twice a year, and feature three dimensional characters attempting to deal with adult issues in a grown-up way that often ends up (quite hilariously) going terribly wrong? That's Bevans and Fellner. "They are energetic, not naïve, not arty-farty, or up their own arses," Grant told the BBC about the duo. Of course, they do make nutty films that teeter on the edge of ridiculous (Johnny English, Big Lebowski, Fargo), and once every decade or so, get a great idea for a kid's movie that turns into a mega-flop (The Borrowers and last year's Thunderbirds), but no one who has had as many hits as Working Title is going to be without a few misses, too. "They cover each other and complement each other. Tim has incredible drive and focus, while Eric can smooth ruffled feathers anytime," says Universal Chairman Stacey Snider, who distributes, finances and markets the duo's films. "And they're both material-driven, which is rare."

Whether material or brand driven, filling niches in the market or creating new ones, the new generation of Hollywood's biggest and best producers all share a common thread: They all trust themselves to make movies that audiences want to see, and find ways to get their films - in a marketplace jammed with hundreds of films - up on screens, in front of audiences - which is the whole idea.

Photo by Sylvia Hardt