The ‘weird arranged marriage’ team behind ‘The Perfect Guy’

Tommy Oliver and David Rosenthal aren’t your typical Hollywood team.

Oliver, who is black, grew up in the projects in Philadelphia, graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, moved to Seattle and started a tech company before he got into filmmaking and producing. Rosenthal, a New York native who is white, studied poetry in college and wrote for the Paris Review before gravitating toward cinematography and ultimately directing.

They were brought together by Sony’s Screen Gems label to collaborate on the thriller “The Perfect Guy,” which finished the weekend atop the box office with an estimated $26.7 million in domestic ticket sales. Rosenthal, 46, directed the film; Oliver, 31, produced it, alongside Nicole Rocklin, Wendy Rhoads and Darryl Taja.

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Oliver compares their pairing to a “weird arranged marriage.” He said the first time they met in spring 2014, it felt more like a date than a business meeting.

“Love at first sight,” Rosenthal joked.

In today’s Hollywood, examples of this kind of diversity within a production are rare. But in an interview before the film’s release, Oliver and Rosenthal downplayed the interracial aspect of their pairing. They were trying to make a successful movie, not send a message.

“We weren’t the obvious choices,” Oliver said. “But we both had a similar vision for making something that we could be proud of.”

The film stars Michael Ealy (“Think Like a Man”) and Sanaa Lathan (“The Best Man Holiday”). Ealy plays a creepy character named Carter who seeks revenge against Lathan’s Leah, a woman he had been briefly dating before she ended the relationship. The film, which cost just under $12 million to make, was shot in Los Angeles.

Though “The Perfect Guy” is a suspense thriller, the director and producer share a rapport that resembles a buddy duo in a comedy.

As they talked about the film during a recent interview in downtown Los Angeles, they sometimes finished each other’s sentences.

“We were in sync just all the time,” said Rosenthal, who received a master’s in poetry from Sarah Lawrence and a master’s in film from the American Film Institute.

The director hadn’t worked on a studio film before “The Perfect Guy” but gained notoriety in the indie world after the release of his first feature, “See This Movie,” which starred Seth Meyers and John Cho, in 2004.

Oliver too is new to the studio scene and thriller genre. He made his directorial debut with a semiautobiographical drama, “1982,” which premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. He also served as a producer on the 2011 Sundance Audience Award-winning film “Kinyarwanda,” about a young Tutsi woman and a young Hutu man who fall in love amid the chaos in Rwanda.

“The Perfect Guy” was a way for the two to switch gears and try something new. It was also an opportunity to work on a larger scale, with a bigger — yet still modest — budget.

“My first experience with the studio system was pretty sweet,” Rosenthal said. “The shoot went well, the post went well, there seems to be excitement.”

Oliver agreed the experience behind the scenes was worthwhile, but as a person of color, working in Hollywood in general has been a “mixed bag.”

“There’s been a whole lot of good and a whole lot of support in terms of people seeing the stuff I’ve done and stuff that I’ve worked on,” he said. “It’s opened many doors. But people sometimes see me and sometimes want to pigeonhole me in a certain place ... like they see me and think ‘black franchise.’ That’s not who I am. That’s not what I’m interested in.”

That’s partially why “The Perfect Guy” appealed to Oliver in the first place.

“The studio gave me an opportunity to work on something where this is a film with black leads but it’s not a black movie,” he said. “It’s not an ‘urban’ movie in any way, shape or form. Race is a complete nonissue.”

The cast is predominantly black, but the race of characters is not intrinsic to its story.

Ealy said he had a “gut instinct” when meeting with the filmmakers. “It was wonderful to collaborate with people who wanted to do something a little bit different but at the same time make something we could all be proud of that would do well.”

The success of Universal Pictures’ “Straight Outta Compton,” the biopic about the South L.A. hip-hop group N.W.A, was the most recent demonstration that films with primarily black casts can attract all moviegoers, not just black audiences.

Screen Gems, known for putting out a diverse slate of films, has released many hits starring black actors, including “Think Like a Man” and “The Wedding Ringer.” Last September, when the Sony label released the thriller “No Good Deed, starring Idris Elba and Taraji P. Henson, it opened at No. 1 with $24.5 million and went on to make $52.5 million in the U.S. and Canada.

“Our movies are kind of colorless,” said Clint Culpepper, Screen Gems president. “We purposefully make sure we never mention race.” Nevertheless, Culpepper said there is definitely a need to produce and distribute content to underserved audiences.

“African American audiences haven’t gotten to see themselves in these kinds of roles on the big screen,” he said. “That’s why these movies are fun for us. They are passion projects.”

With “The Perfect Guy,” Culpepper said it was also a “good opportunity” to bring Oliver and Rosenthal together.

“There are stories like this that have been told in different ways,” Culpepper said. “We thought it would be interesting to see what Dave brought artistically to a thriller, and Tommy is really young and talented. I think they both have big careers ahead of them.”

saba.hamedy@latimes.com