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.
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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.”
This story is from the January 25 - February 7, 2016 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the January 25 - February 7, 2016 edition of New York magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
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