B-movie ploy for A-team

In Hollywood there is no shortage of strange bedfellows. But could it be that the same people who brought you “The Pianist” and “Lost in Translation” are behind a B-level horror movie about a homicidal redheaded doll?

Indeed, come Nov. 12, “Seed of Chucky” will be playing in a theater near you, courtesy of Rogue Pictures, the genre label Focus Features launched earlier this year. Just as Miramax has Dimension, Focus -- a unit of Vivendi Universal -- now has its own low-budget, high-box-office popcorn movies to compensate for riskier, lower-grossing art house fare.

But to Focus co-president James Schamus, “Seed of Chucky,” the fifth installment of the horror comedy that began with “Child’s Play,” is not just any horror flick.

“The ‘Seed’ has some gender identification issues,” said Schamus, who is also a film theory professor at Columbia University. “The ‘Seed’ is a countercultural voice and offers a smart critique of dominant mores.”

Schamus and co-president David Linde are in many ways out of place in Hollywood. In fact, they are not in Hollywood. Based in New York, they have a nerdy, even intellectual reputation in an industry known for its flamboyant characters.

“People are always surprised when they don’t find us getting pedicures or debating French film theory,” Schamus said. But he insists they are salesmen like everyone else in the business.

“You have to have a taste for salesmanship,” he said. “You have to convince people that they should put their money down to see this film.”

And this year -- their biggest ever -- they have had to do a lot of convincing. Now that they are branching out with more releases and a genre label, some in the industry wonder how long they can sustain their batting average.

Only three years into Focus’ existence, the company has received 17 Oscar nominations and four wins, including best actor for Adrien Brody in “The Pianist” and original screenplay for Sofia Coppola for “Lost in Translation.”

These sophisticated crowd pleasers also reaped very strong revenues, both grossing $120 million worldwide. Focus’ movies have grossed an average of more than $18 million -- extraordinary for art house fare. This spring, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” brought in more than $53 million worldwide.

Their latest films, “Vanity Fair,” “Shaun of the Dead” and “The Motorcycle Diaries,” have performed solidly at the box office and received good reviews.

So far, they have had two domestic duds: “Sylvia” with Gwyneth Paltrow, which received lukewarm reviews and grossed only $1 million; and the Heath Ledger/Orlando Bloom drama “Ned Kelly,” a movie Focus did not produce but distributed domestically for a fee. That film grossed less than $90,000 in the U.S. and a little more than $6 million internationally.

The company recently finished production on its most expensive feature ever, the intercontinental spy thriller “The Constant Gardener,” which is directed by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”) and was shot in London, Kenya, Sudan, Berlin and Winnipeg, Canada. The movie, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, cost north of $30 million.

Next year will also see the release of the new movie by Ang Lee, Schamus’ longtime collaborator. “Brokeback Mountain,” a romantic drama based on a story by Annie Proulx, stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Ledger as intimate friends working the Wyoming range.

Under Rogue Pictures, they will have “Assault on Precinct 13,” a remake of the John Carpenter action film due out Jan. 21, and “Unleashed,” the Jet Li-Morgan Freeman gangster movie scheduled for April 8.

While Focus’ growth is a sign of success, some point to Miramax as a cautionary example of a studio that grew beyond its means, going from producing $15-million films to ones with bloated budgets of more than $80 million. Linde is keenly aware of the pitfalls and says he’s determined to stick to the niche he’s carving out with more moderately budgeted films.

Focus is one of about six specialized studios currently distributing and producing “independent” films. But it is unique in its reliance on the international market for financing and product. The company retains worldwide distribution rights to over 75% of the films it releases in North America. It also acquires titles separately for the overseas market, typically earning 120% to 300% of its domestic return from overseas box office.

The executives’ personal style is also unique. If Harvey and Bob Weinstein are known as the blustering street vendors of the independent world, Schamus and Linde are generally described as gentlemanly by competitors, fair by buyers and people you “want to do business with” by producers. While they are well regarded, they also live by a competitive mantra learned from Harvey Weinstein: “If you want something, get it.”

“People deal with Harvey because they have to,” said producer Saul Zaentz, who had a notoriously unhappy experience with Miramax on his film “The English Patient.” “They deal with these guys because they want to.”

A pair’s credentials

When Universal Pictures Chairwoman Stacey Snider began looking for someone to run the studio’s specialized division, she realized it was a short list. “I was looking for a person who was entrepreneurial, independent-spirited, film loving and not part of the system, but also with enough experience to run a business.”

Schamus, who is a screenwriter in addition to being a producer, and Linde had worked with Universal on Ang Lee’s “Ride With the Devil.” Their company, Good Machine International, had also handled the foreign sales for some Universal films. Snider was impressed: “I got to see their left brains and their right brains work.”

And to her surprise it turned out to be an easy sell. “They loved Good Machine, but it’s also hard not having the resources,” she said. “Here they would have the resources.” Focus would operate autonomously from Universal, and be given a budget for productions and development of movies by its parent company. Universal, in turn, would use Focus as a source of revenue and to find new talent. (The two men oversee a staff of more than 100 based out of New York, Los Angeles and London.)

Some who had known them for years were leery. The pair had been a major force in the New York independent film community through Good Machine, which Schamus founded with producer Ted Hope in 1991. They’d built a reputation for developing colorful films with directors such as Todd Solondz (“Happiness”), Nicole Holofcener (“Walking and Talking”) and Lee (“Eat Drink Man Woman,” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), and many wondered if becoming a subsidiary of a studio would change them.

But those fears were quelled when Focus was formally launched at the 2001 Cannes film festival and the new company snared “The Pianist.”

After months of wooing Roman Polanski’s producer, Robert Benmussa, Linde and Focus’ vice president of publicity, Adriene Bowles, met with the director at the Carlton on the morning of a bidding frenzy.

After some discussion, the director gave them the film, confident that they could handle such a personal project.

There were rumblings about Focus having had an inside deal. Some scoffed at Schamus and Linde for paying $5 million on a slow-paced Holocaust drama. The film garnered seven Academy Award nominations and won in three categories.

Last year was just as momentous. Cannes rejected Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” for competition. Rebounding, the Focus team launched the film from the Venice, Berlin and Toronto film festivals.

In the end, this quirky movie became an international hit and earned Coppola two Oscar nominations, including for best director -- an honor never before bestowed on an American woman.

‘Diary’ details

Fresh from the Sundance Film Festival early this year, director Walter Salles was invited to Focus’ New York offices on a wintry afternoon. For the next three hours Focus executives -- seated around the table and via telephone from Los Angeles -- joined Salles and his producers, including Robert Redford, in hammering out the marketing and publicity details for “The Motorcycle Diaries.”

Salles had hoped he would be asked for his opinion. The collaboration surprised him.

“It’s a company that is headed by true filmmakers. They have a creative relationship with people they work with,” said Salles via telephone from London, where he was promoting the film. “And that is getting more and more rare today.”

Often, Schamus, Linde and their staffs can be found debating movies like college film students. Schamus was nurtured on classic foreign films. As he grew up in the San Fernando Valley, film was his ticket to see the world. Last year, he earned his doctorate in English from UC Berkeley.

Linde, tall and athletically built, speaks German and a little French and Italian, and he spent part of his youth in Germany, his father’s homeland. He views the world as one giant harvest, ripe with interesting filmmakers. He learned the ropes at Miramax and was the founding executive of that company’s international division. He met Schamus when negotiating a deal for Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet.”

This year at Cannes, Focus hosted a luncheon to thank foreign filmmakers, distributors and exhibitors for their support. Linde is known among some as “the quiet American.”

“All of the American dealers are very aggressive and violent,” said Valerio De Paolis, president of BIM Distribuzione in Rome. “But [Linde and Schamus] don’t laugh. They don’t tease you. They are conservative and want their money, but they are also respectful.”

To Focus, different languages and cultures are not barriers but opportunities.

“They are not foreign filmmakers to us,” said Schamus. “Our marketplace is the world marketplace. It is not as if you cross some kind of Rubicon when you enter Hollywood and never emerge. These filmmakers want to go back and forth between many different kinds of movies.... They want to go back and speak the language that is not the Hollywood language.... We can facilitate that kind of movement.”