It's good to be King: Scorsese, Depp & Jolie highlight GK Films slate
Oct 25, 2011
'The Rum Diary'
The U.K.-born, L.A.-based King, who runs GK Films with Tim Headington and is also currently partnered with FilmDistrict, already has over 20 feature films to his credit as producer or executive producer. As a producer, he was nominated for an Oscar in 2004 for Scorsese’s The Aviator and won the statuette for the director’s 2006 The Departed. His projects have garnered a total of 38 Academy Award nominations and logged $2 billion in worldwide box office. King makes no secret of how to create films that play to audiences: “I firmly believe in preview screenings and listening to what the audience wants.”
As producer, King continues his partnerships with Scorsese and Depp on the period mystery-adventure Hugo, due in theatres from Paramount on Nov. 23 and presented on Oct. 10 by the New York Film Festival as a surprise “work in progress” from a “visionary filmmaker.” (Said “visionary” Scorsese introduced the film to a packed house at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall and received a rousing ovation.) The three men are producers of the film and GK Films is credited along with Depp’s Infinitum Nihil as production companies.
Based on Brian Selznick’s best-seller The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the fantasy tale of an orphan living in a 1930 Paris train station stars a number of big names including Depp, Jude Law, Sacha Baron Cohen, Emily Mortimer, Christopher Lee and Ray Winstone. The two young leads, Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass), shine as stars in the making.
Hugo also represents Scorsese and King’s first foray into 3D. So was it Scorsese, King, maybe Depp (whose latest Pirate turn was in 3D) or Paramount who opted for the format? King replies, “Marty called me and said he had an idea. And he wanted to shoot it in 3D and not go the conversion route.” Considering the step into the new dimension and Hugo’s huge scale, he quickly adds, “I think this movie makes me the most proud.”
King is also partnered with Depp’s Infinitum Nihil production company on The Rum Diary, having its East Coast premiere at the mid-October Hamptons International Film Festival prior to its Oct. 28 release through GK Films-affiliated FilmDistrict.
Depp, again channeling the gonzo exploits of his late real-life friend and hell-raiser Hunter S. Thompson, stars as a freelance journalist who travels to a gorgeous Caribbean locale in the ’50s and falls into a love triangle and funny (illegal) business. Also on assignment for this jaunt from director Bruce Robinson (the cult classic Withnail & I) are Amber Heard, Aaron Eckhart, Giovanni Ribisi and Richard Jenkins.
Comments King, “Johnny again is so great as the Thompson character [Depp memorably did his first Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas] and Bruce Robinson tells a good story. It’s a fun ride and makes education very entertaining or vice-versa.”
Borrowing some serious heat from the Hollywood world, GK Films and FilmDistrict will seriously test the art-house waters beginning Dec. 23 with Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey. Jolie makes a stunning feature debut as writer-director of this brutal, emotionally charged anti-war film about a love affair set against the hellish Balkan war of the ’90s, when the Serbo-Croatian and Muslim factions starred in their own holocaust. Authenticity and exceptional writing and performances will shake skeptics from their idée fixe of Jolie as superstar and serial mother, embedded in the media-made “Brangelina” phenomenon. Shot in Hungary and in two versions (English and the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language known as BCS), Blood and Honey brilliantly evokes the war-torn Balkan region.
As King’s earlier credits and imminent line-up suggest, he delivers the goods of a major player. But movie mythology and lore have floated and inflated other notions of the iconic Hollywood producer: a passion for film from an early age, a focused drive to get into the Biz and succeed, fantastic luck in finding the right mentors and opportunities, a knack for forging and keeping the right relationships, and possessing an indefinable talent. King doesn’t let us down here either.
He was raised in un-posh London where “I was lucky to have parents who were big film buffs, so I grew up exposed to so many movies. Dad liked the war stuff and my mother lighter fare like musicals, but they appreciated a wide spectrum of films and this was my introduction.”
King’s parents divorced and because his mother was such a movie fan and the U.K. was seeing hard times, she resettled on her own in southern California. But “she wanted to get me out of the U.K. too. So I was 17 when I hit L.A. on vacation to check it out.”
He made the permanent move in 1982 and immediately after landed a summer job at Fox in the international TV distribution department. “I had met an English girl who worked on the lot and she advised me that I should get my foot in the door there. It was just supposed to be a summer gig, but I had the good luck to meet the president of international TV who happened to be British. He had me come to his office and we learned we were from the same part of London. He became my mentor, my dad in America.”
The luck escalated as notions of college receded. “I landed in international TV when no one cared about it. But it exploded when I was there, so I stayed on for seven years and learned all I did about TV and film distribution at Fox, under my mentor.”
And there were other lessons learned at Fox. “I saw how things were always changing, that people were always so nervous about their jobs. I realized then that I didn’t want to be in my mid-50s and out of work. I wanted to control my own destiny. So I left and started working at a small indie company called Cori Films.”
The bigger step came soon after when King in the ’90s founded his own company Initial Films, which did international sales. As president and CEO, King went on to be an executive producer on such films as Peter Care’s The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Michael Mann's biographical Will Smith-starrer Ali and Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-winning ensemble drama Traffic. King went on to executive produce the USA cable network’s miniseries "Traffic," for which he received an Emmy Award nomination. Comments King, “We got a hold of a couple of movies and they did quite well.”
Fortune again kicked in. “It was a very special time in Germany [the late ’90s] when you could raise money because a lot of people were able to go public on the German stock exchange. We went public and raised $100 million and were looking for bigger movies.”
And then came the big breakthrough that began with a phone call from an agent regarding a project involving Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio called Gangs of New York. “The word was that they were looking for a partner, so I said I’d love to read the script.”
And here’s where King goes for some risky business and canny strategizing. Prior to production, “I bought the international rights to the film through Initial, using 80% of the money we had raised through the Germans to do this. I thought, at least Joe Roth [who headed Disney, which at the time owned future Gangs distributor Miramax] will know who we are if we get involved. With a Chase Manhattan credit line behind us, we got the [international] movie rights and that commitment got the film green-lighted. I was swamped by people wanting to buy it.”
As an example, he cites the Japanese, who, based on the script they read (translated into Japanese), forked over close to $20 million for their rights. “I played the DiCaprio card and sold out all rights before principal began.” But some in the industry questioned the gamble. “One trade called me the ‘suicide King’ for making so big a commitment,” recalls King.
King sold Initial but bought it back and, in another lucky coup, met Tim Headington, a Dallas-based oil industry exec. Says King, “He wanted to put some money into films, but I told him that I wasn’t in the equity business. In any case, we got to know each other and after a year we had bonded. So I asked him to invest not in single movies but in the company and he came in for a small amount. At the time, I was making The Departed and was helping with Blood Diamond.”
King’s association with Headington began as he was closing Initial, where Headington had invested a la carte per title. When in May 2007 King launched GK Films, he brought in Headington as his business partner. “We started in foreign sales with Initial,” explains King, “and when I closed Initial I had to make my decision: Do I stay on the lot [at Initial, King had a first-look producing deal with Warner Bros. Pictures] or go independent? I sat with Tim and told him, ‘I can stay on the lot or start a bigger production and distribution company and I just want you to be part of this.’”
King took the latter path. “I told Jeff Robinov [now Warner Bros. Pictures president], who’s a good friend, that ‘I can’t wait till your people green-light my pictures.’” This decision to make the break has given King more leeway to work with both the studios and more independently through FilmDistrict, the company formed when GK Films partnered with Peter Schlessel.
With deep roots in distribution, King says he got into production “by default. I have to put up money, but it comes down to the quality of the product. The movie has to play. So I found out that investing in a movie also requires being very creative.”
With FilmDistrict, also guided by indie distrib vet Bob Berney, King and GK Films are very much in the distribution game and share the same office space. It was the lush three-fold Oscar-nominated historical drama The Young Victoria, starring post-Prada Emily Blunt, that forged the partnership. King explains that the film was wrangling for a good distributor. Schlessel and Berney were interested in the picture and King committed the P&A. Observes King, “We did OK with the movie. So I proposed to Bob [Berney] that as there’s no more Miramax or Warner Independent Films or the like, here’s an opportunity. FilmDistrict was born and is run out of my office.”
The older partnership with Scorsese goes back about a decade. An early Scorsese fan well before they joined forces, King calls him “the greatest director who ever lived.” A few years after their first collaboration, Gangs of New York, came the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, for which King earned an Academy Award nomination and won a BAFTA Award for Best Picture. He was also honored by the Producers Guild of America with a Golden Laurel Award as Producer of the Year. The Departed, which brought King an Academy Award and Scorsese a long-overdue Best Director Oscar, marked King’s third collaboration with the filmmaker.
As for the partnership with Depp, King calls it a “matter of having great chemistry and seeing eye-to-eye on movies.”
Obviously, 24K talent attracts King to projects, but even more important is “what’s on the page.” So, yes, he does read scripts. “ The Town was my movie because I really loved the script. You’ve got to tell the story and that story has to be for an audience.”
Even if the audience isn’t stateside. While King projects like Gangs of New York and the Jolie and Depp-starrer The Tourist, each reportedly costing around $100 million, grossed well below the $100 million benchmark domestically, both (The Tourist especially) had far more respectable numbers overseas.
Says King, “I have always considered the overseas markets when making a film, since that is my background. However, the one thing I think more about than anything else is the script.”
As a number of his films suggest, King also admits to an affinity for “the world of gangsters and corruption, those stories that expose the underbelly of society.”
So how did his involvement with Jolie’s searing war drama In the Land of Blood and Honey come about? (The two had met on The Tourist.) King, who shares a producer credit with Headington and Jolie, recounts, “She called me one day and said, ‘I wrote something that I want you to read.’ I did and went ‘Wow!’ And then she proposed directing it. What did give me a little hesitation was that [in one version] the [Balkan] characters would be speaking English. But I decided that the level of investment and the quality of the material made it worth it.”
Just as he threw most of his company’s money at Gangs of New York to gain a bigger stake and higher visibility in the business, King, with Jolie’s specialized effort, takes another kind of risk. But such risk-taking is yet another “kingly” attribute of successful producers.
Momentum is another and King keeps the films coming. Recently, he had the animated Rango in theatres worldwide, where both domestic and international grosses broke the $100 million mark.
King and Depp’s Infinitum Nihil are now completing the gothic horror Dark Shadows, from the cult TV series, for Warner Bros. with Depp starring and Tim Burton directing. GK Films also announced development of the screen adaptation of the long-running, Tony-winning musical Jersey Boys.
There have also been rumors of an Untitled Freddie Mercury Story starring Sacha Baron Cohen (Baron Cohen as Mercury? Well, he did warm up as Bruno) and being written by twice Oscar-nominated Peter Morgan ( The Queen, Frost/Nixon). King confirms this but leaves open the question of Baron Cohen as Queen’s front man. “I’m a big fan of real-life stories, so I’m excited about producing Mercury.”
Also in the works are a reboot of the action franchise Tomb Raider and, at Warner Bros., the Depp-starrer Shantaram and, also with Depp’s Infinitum Nihil, Sasha's Story: The Life and Death of a Russian Spy.
And, with King and Headington producing, GK Films has reportedly just hired Robert Towne to write The Battle of Britain, about the lengthy and devastating World War II conflict that pitted the Royal Air Force against the Nazis’ Luftwaffe. Although London suffered bombing damage and loss of lives, the British succeeded in holding off the Germans and paving the way for the historic Normandy invasion.
Taking a page from his earliest lesson on the Fox lot about the importance of TV, King in 2010 also launched GK-TV with Headington. The unit has already scored big with their miniseries “Camelot.”
Of course, the mythic Hollywood big shots depicted in films, literature and urban tales are, like most of us, not exactly perfect. But the real-life King, not yet a myth, is the real deal. He hasn’t just proven he’s a producer’s producer or star filmmaker’s producer. Lucky for theatre owners and movie lovers of all stripes, he’s an audience’s producer.
And while King hasn’t yet been hailed with “Long Live the King” fanfare, he was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2009. Which seems royal enough for a Hollywood producer who long ago bolted the Empire for sunnier movie climes. His advice to commoners aspiring to the realm of filmmaking recalls his own path: “Find your passion and never give up on making it happen.”
