When he wasn’t hanging out with Bradley Cooper, or leasing a horse for Kate Bosworth, or negotiating a Golden Globes shout-out from Christian Bale, or bringing a baby wolf to the office, one Hollywood studio head was talking up the sweetest game in town: the chance to invest in movies that couldn’t fail. And plenty of people bought what Ryan Kavanaugh was selling.
In an industry where no one knows anything, here, finally, was someone who seemed to know something: Ryan Kavanaugh, a spikily red-haired man-child with an impish grin and a uniform of jeans and Converse sneakers who had an uncanny ability to fill a room and an irresistible outlook on how to make money making movies. Not yet 30 when he founded Relativity Media in 2004, he very quickly became not only a power player in Hollywood but the man who might just save it. With a dwindling number of studios putting out ever fewer movies, other than ones featuring name-brand superheroes, Kavanaugh became first a studio financier and then a fresh-faced buyer of textured, mid-budget films. To bankers, Kavanaugh appeared to have come up with a way to forecast a famously unpredictable business by replacing the vagaries of intuition with the certainties of math.
Even Hollywood wasn’t used to a pitch this good. Kavanaugh alternately dazzled and baffled—talking fast, scrawling numbers and arrows and lines on whiteboards, projecting spreadsheets. “You get caught up in the enthusiasm,” a former colleague says of Kavanaugh’s powers of persuasion. “It’s like trying to analyze love. I know that sounds absurd. This guy’s charisma is really that good.”
Denne historien er fra January 25 - February 7, 2016-utgaven av New York magazine.
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Denne historien er fra January 25 - February 7, 2016-utgaven av New York magazine.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Early and Often: David Freedlander - Momentum vs. Machine The Trump and Harris campaigns battle it out for every last vote.
WIth two weeks left to go, the contours of the 2024 presidential election are clear: Both campaigns need voters who usually don’t vote, and Kamala Harris needs to bring the Democratic coalition, including its Trump-curious members, back home.While the Republican side plans to spend the remaining days of the contest trying to lure low-propensity voters to the polls, the Harris team will attempt to persuade voters of color to return to its side and will try to increase numbers among white voters in previously red suburbs.
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