Oct 25, 2011
-By Doris Toumarkine
'The Rum Diary'
Hollywood hasn’t yet crowned Graham King one of the industry’s most
successful producers ever. But, only flirting with 50, he has time
and isn’t wasting any of it, as his upcoming 2011 releases from the
likes of Martin Scorsese, Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie suggest.
So, as Central Casting might see it, King sure looks the part and
could definitely fill the throne.
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.”
Jolie’s
deeply moving “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” a love story set
against the backdrop of the devastating ethnic conflict in Bosnia during
the 1990s, has received mixed reviews. Many critics praised Jolie’s
writing and direction and the immensely talented cast made up of actors
from all sides of the conflict, but the film and Jolie have also had
their share of controversy, including attacks from some Serbian
organizations who dismissed the film as propaganda. 
The producer tells Metro what he thinks of a moviegoer's claim that the Ryan Gosling film's trailer was misleading. 
Graham King’s GK Films has acquired the film rights to Tomb Raider with the intention of rebooting the video game franchise on the big screen by 2013.
