The Misfits

For fear of having projects stranded in turnaround, Hanley avoids development scenarios, preferring to retain the rights and use the studios to finance them upon completion under a negative pickup or production deal. Consequently, his financing tends to come from wherever he can find it, often a loose, overlapping consortium of foreign entities in the Canal Plus orbit. Describing the division of labor at Muse between himself and Roberta, Hanley says, “I’m the president of Muse Productions. She‘s the chairman. Chairman’s higher. She probably produces as much as me, but she makes me do the hardcore, in-the-trenches stuff -- financing and on-the-set. She gets the screenplays going, and she‘s written several of our properties, or co-written them with people. I have to work the festivals more, hang out with Wild Bunch, Studio Canal, and do more of the traveling into Germany, England, Paris, Madrid, closing the deals. I’m pretty good with legal things. But Roberta and I trade off constantly.”(Roberta also directed Woundings, based on a Jeff Noon play.)

“I think there‘s a kind of parallel world that Chris inhabits, of random bankers and found money and instinct and openness,” says director James Toback (Two Girls and a Guy). “And it’s not really the so-called independent world, because that phrase has ceased to mean anything. There‘s an almost Don Quixote--like courage to persisting in it, because it’s so out of step, really, with what drives movies ultimately, which is money and marketing.”

“In some ways I‘m seen as being subversive, but it’s not my intention,” says Hanley. “I didn‘t come out here trying to fight the system. I just assumed that if you had an interesting idea, it would be well-received. I think the brilliant moments in all of history would be like what they say in complexity theory -- right at the edge of chaos. It’s not actually chaotic activity, but it‘s near-chaotic activity, where mutations take place at the most frequent rate. My films are kind of like these little mutations. I don’t calculate what a contemporary audience is looking for. I don‘t think about that. I could, by accident, choose that, but that’s not what‘s causing me to push something. Blair Witch, to me, was an exploration of minimalist filmmaking. I mean, as a former art dealer and artist, I think, this is great -- half the movie is a shot of leaves on the ground at night. What could be more interesting to me? But I don’t understand why anybody else likes it.”

THE LIFER

Steve Golin:“For Good and Against Evil”

[FILMOGRAPHY]

The Blue Iguana (1988)

Kill Me Again (1989)

Fear, Anxiety & Depression (1989)

Wild at Heart (1990)

Madonna: Truth or Dare

(supervising producer, 1991)

Candyman (1992)

Kalifornia (1993)

Fallen Angels (1993)

Red Rock West (1994)

The Portrait of a Lady

(associate producer, 1996)

The Game (1997)

Your Friends and Neighbors (1998)

Nurse Betty (2000)

Bounce (2000)

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2003)

Perhaps more than any of the producers profiled here, Steve Golin is equally at home with small, quirky upstarts (Being John Malkovich) and strictly a commercial fare (Beverly Hills 90210). And it is precisely such properties as Charlie Kaufman‘s Malkovich -- legendary scripts within the development community -- that aren’t likely to get made without the intervention of a name producer or studio executive who takes it on as a personal mission.

“Not only can Steve break down doors,” says Steve Unger, Golin‘s former assistant and now an agent at ICM, “but he also knows which doors to go through. And he overcomes obstacles brilliantly. I’m in awe of his ability to get things done. Producing is a relationship game, and he‘s proven that his are long and fruitful.”

Like Don Murphy, Golin is the son of a successful New York ad man, a biochemist in Rockland County who specialized in medical advertising. After NYU film school, Golin transferred to the AFI producers program, where he met Joni Sighvatsson, a former Icelandic rock star who’d been up at Berkeley on a Fulbright scholarship. After producing several best-forgotten titles -- Hard Rock Zombies, American Drive-In -- together to ramp up their learning curve, they formed Propaganda Films in 1986 to capitalize on the cresting music-video wave. At its height, the company produced some $50 million in revenue and more than 150 music videos annually, or roughly one-third of those being aired. Yet unlike others at the time, Propaganda managed to leverage its production skills and contacts into an R&D process for feature films, incidentally launching the careers of many of today‘s top Hollywood directors -- David Fincher, Michael Bay, Spike Jonze, Dominic Sena, Simon West, Antoine Fuqua, Mark Romanek and Michel Gondry -- and adding commercial production and management arms along the way.

They also produced half a dozen dark, edgy thrillers, much of early David Lynch (Wild at Heart, the Twin Peaks pilot) and, although no one remembers it today, misfit-auteur director Todd Solondz’s first film, Fear, Anxiety and Depression.

“Joni and I were definitely like fire and water at the end,” says Golin, reflecting back on a split that still carries battle scars on both sides. “Joni likes to wind people up, and I basically had to calm them down. It was a little bit like Ronnie Meyer with Ovitz. I admire Joni, and I think he‘s very clever, but we ran out of steam. We had very similar skills, and I think that we complemented each other very well. We still have a very interesting shorthand between us that I don’t have with anybody else.”