In Focus

In Focus

Date: Tuesday, February 28 2006

Canadian hearts swell whenever one of their own marches on Hollywood with movie-mogul ambitions.

Toronto's Derek Elliot is the latest. Elliot caught the movie bug in 2004 when Montreal-based independent producer Media 8 Entertainment shot the Amanda Bynes-starring teen pic "Lovewrecked" on location at his tony Sun Village Resort and Spa in the Dominican Republic.


That sand-to-stardust Hollywood shoot led Elliot, backed by his family's real estate fortune, to invest in future Media 8 films, most recently Mike Binder's Ben Affleck starrer "Man About Town."

"We're not dabblers. This is a business opportunity for us," Elliot says, pointing to Gulf & Western Industries, the sprawling conglomerate that bought Paramount in 1966, as the template for his own Hollywood play.

Ever since Louis B. Mayer co-founded MGM, ambitious Canadians have latched on to Hollywood partners, told the business media they were hardly in over their heads, and then sunk, swam or disappeared in shark-infested waters.

Most famously, there was Edgar Bronfman Jr. steering his family's Seagram empire away from liquor and Dupont stock into PolyGram and Universal Pictures before an ill-fated all-stock acquisition by Vivendi six years ago.

Elsewhere, high-flying Toronto investment banker Frank Guistra launched Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment as a mini-studio in 1997, only to sell his depleted stake in 2002 to Los Angeles-based investors Michael Burns and Jon Feltheimer.

Also ending up on Hollywood's cutting-room floor was Montreal-based visual effects software giant Richard Szalwinski, whose Discreet Logic empire in 1996 bought independent producer Malo film. Szalwinski quickly expanded and ran up steep losses before merging with Los Angeles-based Mark Damon's MDP Worldwide. That union eventually morphed into the nominally Canadian Media 8 Entertainment, Elliot's current partner.

There is the occasional success story. Buyout specialist Gerry Schwartz followed up taking a minority stake in independent producer Phoenix Pictures by flipping the Loews Cineplex cinema chain for $1.4 billion. But mostly there's flame-outs, with Fireworks Entertainment Inc., Paragon Entertainment, Telescene Film Group and Blackwatch Entertainment rounding out the list of production also-rans.

Elliot aims to buck that trend by making "studio-quality pictures for indie prices" with Media 8 Entertainment. He was emboldened by the Weinstein brothers' recent acquisition of U.S. release rights for "Lovewrecked."

And Elliot insists he holds patient money and a long-term view of the movie production market.

Etan Vlessing can be reached at etan.vlessing@sympatico.ca