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James Schamus's Focus Features' Last Hurrah: the amazing "Dallas Buyers Club"
Aloysius J. Gleek:
James Schamus’s Focus Features had built its enviable track record by making smart movies in the space between the tentpoles and the tadpoles, but that position has become unstable territory. “There’s no business model for a truly autonomous art-house-film company within a studio operation,” Ted Hope says. “It’s no longer good enough for a specialized division just to make its money back, as Focus did. It now has to make its money back and be a profit center.” In 2012, Focus Features had its first year in the red.
Schamus’s iconoclasm earned him the respect of the actors and directors he worked with, some of whom took the news of his departure particularly hard. “Schamus’s only liability may have been good taste,” Sean Penn told The Hollywood Reporter.
http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/james-schamus-career-middlebrow-films.html
Does the Departure of Focus Features'
James Schamus
Foretell the End of the Studio Indie?
By Frank Digiacomo
James Schamus, photographed by Payam
If Harvey Weinstein is the Incredible Hulk of New York’s art-house scene, James Schamus is its affable, brainy Bruce Banner. With his Poindexter-style glasses and predilection for bow ties, Plato, and Parisian restaurants, the CEO and co-founder of Universal’s Focus Features is the “Professor of Micropopularity,” as The New York Times Magazine dubbed him in 2010, a reference to both his academic background—he’s earned three degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, including a Ph.D. in English, and teaches film studies at Columbia University—and his devotion to daring filmmaking that isn’t obviously commercial.
The films he backed stick with you long after the credits roll and the Oscars (84 nominations and sixteen wins in twelve years) are tallied. The Pianist, Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Kids Are All Right, Atonement, and Milk are all Focus releases. That track record is likely why the announcement earlier this month that Universal Pictures had fired Schamus led the trade presses to trot out such descriptors as “Shocker!” and “dramatic.” The company’s Bleecker Street headquarters will be shuttered, and what’s left of Focus will now be steered from Los Angeles by Peter Schlessel, the founder of the more commercially oriented FilmDistrict.
Schamus’s career as an architect of the smart, accessible movie began in 1991, when he co-founded, with Ted Hope, Good Machine, a production and, with the arrival in 1997 of partner David Linde, international-sales company that was behind Todd Solondz’s black comedy Happiness and director Nicole Holofcener’s first feature, Walking and Talking. Schamus is known for his devotion. When his commercial flight was grounded on its way to the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, where Good Machine would be selling Holofcener’s film, he persuaded Hope to put the cost of a $17,000 private flight on his credit card. That, Hope says, “was when I knew that James could run a film studio.”
Schamus became one of the film world’s most powerful outsiders, finding success cultivating others like himself. Raised in Southern California, “I grew up basically covered with psoriasis,” Schamus told the Times, “and I skipped grades, so I do tend to gravitate to the kid in the corner, who, incidentally, is most likely to grow up to be one of our directors.”
Good Machine’s biggest discovery was Taiwanese director Ang Lee. The company produced his directorial debut, Pushing Hands, and Schamus co-wrote the screenplay, beginning a long-running collaboration that has spanned a dozen films, including The Ice Storm; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and their current project, a 3-D boxing movie.
When Universal Pictures bought Good Machine in 2002 and merged it with other indie labels, Schamus and Linde were named the co-presidents of the result: Focus Features. A friendlier Miramax, Focus was devoted to director-driven films with smart writing and distinguished acting. According to producer John Lyons, who served as president of production for eight years, Focus was a place where “you’ll never see a director’s cut DVD of a movie released later.”
In 2006, Lee won the Oscar for Best Director for Brokeback Mountain, arguably the company’s crowning achievement. Success did not make Schamus part of the Establishment, however. At the London Film Festival in 2009, he gave an “anti-keynote” presentation in which he deconstructed part of the heavily redacted Homeland Security file on his wife, Nancy Kricorian, a novelist and member of the antiwar activist group CodePink: Women for Peace.
Schamus’s iconoclasm earned him the respect of the actors and directors he worked with, some of whom took the news of his departure particularly hard. “Schamus’s only liability may have been good taste,” Sean Penn told The Hollywood Reporter. But his firing also had a familiar ring. The last five years had seen at least as many art-house-film companies folded up or folded into their major-studio parents. In 2008, Time Warner shuttered its Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures labels and closed down New Line Cinema’s New York offices. That same year, Paramount consolidated its Vantage division, and in December 2010, five years after Disney parted ways with Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the entertainment giant sold the much-downsized company that the brothers had founded, Miramax, to an investment group called Filmyard Holdings, which has done disappointingly little with the company.
The calculus that supported Schamus’s choices no longer made sense to executives. As Sleepless in Seattle producer Lynda Obst wrote in her recent book, Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, the collapse of the DVD market as well as the rise of video games, cable, and Netflix have cut into studio profit margins. That contraction also led to a movie market that, Obst observes, increasingly consists of “tentpoles” and “tadpoles”: The former are movies with nine-figure budgets, special effects, and numbers in their titles, like Fast & Furious 6. The latter are films like Beasts of the Southern Wild, which cost less than $2 million to make and gathered heat and distributors through the festival circuit.
Schamus’s Focus had built its enviable track record by making smart movies in the space between the tentpoles and the tadpoles, but that position has become unstable territory. “There’s no business model for a truly autonomous art-house-film company within a studio operation,” Hope says. “It’s no longer good enough for a specialized division just to make its money back, as Focus did. It now has to make its money back and be a profit center.” In 2012, Focus Features had its first year in the red.
With Peter Schlessel at the helm, the new Focus will likely rely less on auteur-driven, Oscar-friendly movies and focus more on the financial sweet spot where independent film intersects with populist tastes. Schlessel’s FilmDistrict is known for its genre productions, smart, stylish—and violent—films, including Looper, Drive. and, in November, Spike Lee’s anticipated adaptation of Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy. But the company’s biggest success has been its Insidious franchise, the first of which, according to Box Office Mojo, was made for $1.5 million and grossed more than $97 million worldwide.
As for the future of those art-middlebrow pictures that were Focus’s specialty, filmmakers say opportunities are still out there, albeit with smaller budgets and less of a shot at theatrical distribution. “There’s more financing money in the marketplace for smart films than I’ve ever seen,” says the indie-film lawyer John Sloss. Specialty distributors are emerging to fill the void and taking the kind of risks for which Schamus was celebrated. “There will be more Beasts of the Southern Wild and Fruitvale Station than ever before,” says Hope, but without the backing of major studios, it will be harder to find them. “We’ll have to do more sifting, more panning for gold.”
*This article appears in the October 28, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
“It’s been an amazing and joyous run at Focus, where our love of film has always been matched by our love and respect for our filmmakers and for each other,” James Schamus said in a statement.
Ted Hope, Schamus’ former colleague at Good Machine, tweeted, “To me this really means the end of indie film — as we once knew it… Schamus = superstar.”
http://insidemovies.ew.com/2013/10/03/james-schamus-ousted-focus-features/
Focus Features ousts co-founder
James Schamus
By Jeff Labrecque
on Oct 3, 2013 at 6:15PM
In a move that completely changes the personality of Focus Features, Universal Pictures chairman Donna Langley announced yesterday that Peter Schlessel will take over for longtime CEO James Schamus. The 54-year-old Schamus co-founded the company in 2001 and built a reputation for Focus as a home for mature prestige pictures like Brokeback Mountain, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Moonrise Kingdom, and Lost in Translation. Schamus was a New Yorker who also taught film at Columbia University, and he was as much identified with his impeccable taste as his trademark bow-tie. Ted Hope, Schamus’ former colleague at Good Machine, tweeted, “To me this really means the end of indie film — as we once knew it… Schamus = superstar.”
Schlessel, a former Sony exec, had been founder and CEO of FilmDistrict, which itself will be absorbed by the new, revamped Focus Features. At FilmDistrict, he’d produced movies like Looper, Drive, and Insidious: Chapter 2, and Universal is turning to him “to maximize its potential by including a greater variety of movies on Focus Features’ film slate.”
“The breadth and depth of Peter’s experience in the film business including production, acquisitions, distribution and most recently running FilmDistrict, will be a tremendous asset to Focus Features as the company broadens its portfolio beyond the production and distribution of specialty product,” Langley said in Universal’s announcement.
Basically, Universal wants more films and less-boutique-y films from the new Focus, which has six films this year, including The Place Beyond the Pines, Admission, and the upcoming Dallas Buyers Club; Universal is aiming to increase production to 10 Focus features per year. Focus’ New York office [on Bleecker Street] will be closed, with Schlessel setting up shop in Los Angeles.
According to reports, Schamus may have suspected a change was coming when Langley was recently promoted to chairman of Universal. But the root of the parting might have been planted all the way back to March 2012 when Universal and Focus won a bidding war for the film rights to Fifty Shades of Grey, a project that never felt like a Schamus joint. Early on, there were rumors that Ang Lee and Joe Wright — two of Schamus’ favorite directors — were in the running to helm the adaptation of E L James’ erotic bestseller, but Sam Taylor-Johnson ultimately landed the gig. Since Fifty Shades is such an enormous project for Universal — one that Langley had been personally involved in acquiring — the studio may have decided it needed someone better suited for the material and for marketing it. Universal, Focus, and Schamus refused to comment on the executive changes.
Schamus will stay on until Jan. 1, and it remains unclear how the transition might impact the promotion and Oscar campaign for Dallas Buyers Club, a project that Schamus championed. “It’s been an amazing and joyous run at Focus, where our love of film has always been matched by our love and respect for our filmmakers and for each other,” he said in a statement.
Schamus, who often works with Lee and co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as well as The Ice Storm, will now focus on developing their next collaboration, “an epic look at the boxing world of the 1960s and 1970s, seen through the prism of its biggest rivalries and greatest fights, including the Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali showdown known as the 'Thrilla in Manila'. ”
[Correction: an earlier version of this story credited Schamus with co-writing Brokeback Mountain. He actually produced the film; Larry McMurtry and Dianna Ossana co-wrote that script.]
Front-Ranger:
On the Focus Features facebook page I posted this:
Focus without Schamus? Unthinkable!
Let's see how long it survives.
ps: Nice to see you John, we've missed you sorely!!
Front-Ranger:
It's gone now...2 seconds, I think.
Jeff Wrangler:
Well, I guess that's show biz. ... :-\
(Yes, we've missed you, John.)
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