Second in a series
See also: Amy Pascal: The Movie Theater Is Our Soul; We Just Need Better Films
The partners in business and in private got Hollywood’s attention after winning the Best Documentary Oscar for "The Cove" earlier this year, and lately in winning bidding wars for sought-after films like Robert Redford’s "The Conspirator," and the awards hopefuls "Winter’s Bone’"and "Biutiful." Howard Cohen and Eric d'Arbeloff sat down with Sharon Waxman to talk about why they still believe in critics, why they’re profitable and why they fly coach to Europe.
Sharon Waxman: You guys seem to have come out of total obscurity to where you’re making waves and getting peoples’ attention. How did that happen?
Eric d'Arbeloff: We’ve been around now for seven years. We started partnering with Goldwyn Films and then that lasted about two and half years and we broke off in, I think it was ...
Howard Cohen: 2007.
ED: Four years ago we started our own releasing organization because we looked around and said, "The model that the studios are producing under doesn’t make a lot of sense." With their big overhead, they’re spending a lot on a limited number of movies. Yet there are a lot of really cool movies out there that are getting under-showed.
Movies that do between $5 and $10 million at the box office might not be that interesting to the studios. So we started a full service organization where we strategize on the marketing, we can book screenings, we have a full finance department in place so we can collect money and do all the things the people expect from a studio but we have a much much lower overhead.
SW: How many people are you?
ED: We’re 15. And we really run it at a fraction of the cost of what the mini-majors are doing.
HC: I think it’s 17.
ED: Yeah, but really we bring people in as we need them.
SW: This year it seems like you’re much more active. You bought some hot pictures at Toronto. Are you changing your strategy?
HC: We’re not changing our strategy radically, but I think we’re being rewarded for the way we’ve been handling films in the past few years, so we’re getting a higher profile of movies than we got in the past.
SW: Well it helps that you won an Oscar.
HC: It made a big difference that we won an Oscar.
SW: So let’s talk about "The Cove." How did you win it?
HC: I think it really came down to the critics. We went into the fall a little bit as an underdog, and in that arena it almost helps to be an underdog.
ED: We did a lot of outreach. We were working with Participant. They came onboard and really handled the outreach. It was actually a three-way pick-up of Lionsgate, Roadside, and Participant.
