The Big Picture: Bob Shaye
Tomorrow we’ll look at Jeff Skoll, the visionary who founded Participant Media, a company with a unique mission for movies. Today consider Bob Shaye, another visionary, but a man who has a 40-year career in Hollywood. In this LA Times article, Patrick Goldstein offers a recap of Shaye’s career with New Line Cinema, including parent company Warner Bros. decision to disband NLC, then interviews Shaye about his newest venture:
After laying low and licking his wounds for several months, Shaye gave me his first interview since Bewkes folded New Line into Warner Bros. back in February. It has long been rumored that Shaye and New Line co-chairman Michael Lynne would resurface with a new production company. Now Shaye is making it official, saying he and Lynne have formed a new company, Unique Features, which will make two to four films a year, funded and distributed by Warners as part of a three-year first-look distribution deal with the conglomerate.
Shaye is a complicated character and as Goldstein notes a “throwback” to Hwood’s early movie moguls:
In an era where the business is dominated by timid bean-counters in stylish suits, Shaye is a throwback to the riverboat-gambler types who used to thrive in Hollywood, having risked his company’s future time and again, most notably when he agreed to make a trilogy of “Lord of the Rings” films after everyone else had shown “LOTR” filmmaker Peter Jackson the door.
The Lord of the Rings story is famous and if you haven’t heard it, here’s the version I remember from a special screening with the filmmakers of LOTR at the WGA Theater back in 2001. Peter Jackson had dreamed of directing Rings for many years and originally managed to set it up at Miramax, albeit producing 2 movies out of the 3 books. Then toward the end of the option period, the Weinsteins hit Jackson with the news: because of budgetary issues, they wanted to do Rings as one movie. Jackson said it was impossible to do justice to the books by producing just one movie. The Weinsteins said they had already talked with a writer-director who had agreed to do the project as a single film. Shocked, Jackson pleaded with the Weinsteins. Eventually they gave Jackson just two weeks to shop the project around town. If he could set it up elsewhere and recoup Miramax’s development fees on the project, they’d give it to Jackson. If not, they’d go ahead and make Rings with the other writer-director.
Since the project’s budget was a big one and studios, at that time, weren’t sold on the fantasy genre, the only options Jackson had were Polygram and New Line. He pitched the project to Polygram, but they were going through a regime change — no luck. So down to one last buyer — New Line and Bob Shaye. Evidently, Jackson pitched the hell out of Rings to Shaye, showing him dozens of drawings, renderings, and models, bouncing around the room acting out the parts of the characters, a full 45-minute pitch, the whole time Shaye not saying one word. Done, Jackson stood there panting, sweat dripping down his body, staring at Shaye. Shaye stared back for a while, then said, “There are three books, right?” Jackson nodded. Shaye said, “Why not make three movies?”
Shaye not only bought the project, he committed to an initial budget of $270M to shoot three movies back-to-back-to-back. No MBA trained studio exec would have had the huevos to do that. But Bob Shaye is a ‘movie guy,’ it’s in his blood. As the LA Times articles notes:
Now Shaye is ready to start all over again. But why? He’s an extremely wealthy man who’s in good health and retains lots of outside interests. At age 69, why wouldn’t he do what David Geffen is doing — get out of the business and cruise around the world on a yacht? It turns out that Shaye and Geffen have talked about that very thing, but Shaye says he’s simply a different person.
“That’s great for David, but for me, it sounds dreary to be on a boat for a year,” says Shaye. “I love movies. And I’m excited about being a seller instead of just being a buyer. I’m excited about using the fertility of my brain, which thank god, isn’t fallow yet.”
He laughs. “You know, they once asked Stanley Kubrick why he never took a vacation. And he said, ‘A vacation from what?’ I just want to keep doing what I love.”