The Money Man
Foreign sales agent Graham King gambled a fortune on Gangs of New York and Traffic. Now he’s upping the ante with his first producing effort, The Aviator.
Source: W
Date: 2/1/2004
 
Back in the spring of 2002, when talk of behind-the-scenes turmoil on the historical epic Gangs of New York was at its apex—“They’ve blown the budget!” “Maw wants reshoots!” “Harvey wants cuts!”—the two larger-than-life characters at the center of the drama, director Martin Scorsese and Miramax cochairman Harvey Weinstein, released the inevitable Terse Written Statement. “As the only two decisionmakers on the film,” it declared, they would be happy to discuss Gangs when it was ready to be screened, but not before.

Nearly two years later, the guy who not only effectively greenlit the picture (he purchased the foreign rights for $65 million, finally allowing Scorsese to roll some film after 30 years of trying) but also schlepped to the Rome set numerous times and participated in countless postproduction meetings, winces slightly on hearing the words read back. But at the time, Graham King’s low profile was a matter of self-preservation. “Being in the middle between Marty and Harvey would have been death for me,” he explains affably in his Cockney accent over breakfast in downtown New York. “So I kept quiet.”

Still, he hastens to add, “When I’m putting up $65 million, I don’t care what they say I’m going to get involved.”

As a foreign sales agent—which on Hollywood’s gold-plated totem pole seems to rank only slightly north of key grip—King has endured his share of slights. The worst occurred the previous year, when Traffic, another film that King greenlit (he furnished 75 percent of the budget), won four Oscars, and one after another, his jubilant colleagues bounded onto the stage and neglected to thank him. “Soderbergh didn’t thank anybody, but the others just, you know, forgot,” he says with a disbelieving shake of the head. “I mean, what do they want me to do? Wave a banner from the audience? Come on! The guy who writes the check should be remembered. Am I right?”

Such moments may still grate a bit, but King, who lives in Pacific Palisades with his wife, Valerie, and two daughters, has long been at home in the background (his hobbies as a high school student in North London were drumming in a band and playing sweeper on his school soccer team). Despite his six-foot-one frame, he’s soft-spoken and somewhat rumpled, and he seems genuinely appreciative—not to say surprised—to have woken up recently with one of the most enviable resumes in Hollywood.

Money and modesty will take you only so far in the movie business, however. So with his latest project The Aviator, Scorsese’s $110 million period biopic about Howard Hughes, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, Gwen Stefani and Kate Beckinsale—King, 42, is finally seizing a bit of the spotlight for himself. In addition to being largely financed by King, the film represents his first outing as a front-line producer—the person who assembles the team, shepherds the project and, with any luck, gets up onstage and forgets to thank people when the Best Picture statuette is handed out. Of course, he also takes the fall if things go bad. “I’m on the hook all the way,” he says.

“Graham’s not the kind of guy to stick his toe in the water to feel the temperature,” notes Weinstein, whose company shares domestic rights to the film with Warner Bros. “He’s jumping in the deep end and doing a cannonball. But so far, he’s done remarkably well.”

“He’s a great partner to have,” adds Uma Thurman, with whom King is producing a romantic comedy called Accidental Husband. “He’s a maverick, and he’s got real class and a tremendous amount of integrity. He’s one of those rare people you meet in this business with courage and a sense of fun and excitement and passion. My great hope is that the angel on his shoulder keeps him safe.”

That kind of praise represents a heady turn of events for someone who just I0 years ago was prowling the aisles of the Palais in Cannes, trying to interest foreign buyers in such late-night cable flotsam as Blood Symbol 7, Devil’s Daughter and “a film about a girl and her dog” called Little Heroes. “I didn’t even have a booth,” King recalls. “Just this bag of flyers.”

The foreign sales business is a side of the industry the public seldom sees, a floating international content bazaar, which brings rights holders (like King) together with acquisitions agents from around the world, who feverishly fling their dinars, pesos, rupees and yen at the latest crop of B-movie diversions—be they completed films or the thinnest of proposals.

When King was working the three major foreign-rights markets (held annually in Cannes, Milan and Santa Monica), projects top-lined by the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme could pull down ungodly sums in presales. Art rarely entered into the equation, unless it was the art of the deal. “You’d see people just writing scripts over lunch,” he recalls, still dumbfounded. He acts out a typical scene: “‘So the guy comes into a room, and da-da-da, and Pow!, and he has a partner and there’s a woman and …’ It was like, a bit of sex and a bit of violence and you’ve got a movie. The market would snap it up like that.”

He prospered because he had a cultural anthropologist’s instinct for how tastes vary around the world—the German squeamishness over disturbing themes, the French fondness for unhappy endings, the mysterious Japanese aversion to Russell Crowe and so on. “The hardest thing is getting a drama that fits Japan, Sweden, Australia,” he says. “You can’t please everyone, so you go for the majority and try to please your own taste.”

King, raised in a working-class family, turned up in L.A. at 19 on a student visa and stumbled into a job as a temp at 20th Century Fox. There, he found a mentor in Bill Saunders, then president of Fox Television International, who, as it happened, had grown up in the same East End neighborhood as King’s father. Armed with Saunders’s advice to “be as honest as you can without telling the truth,” King found the sales game relatively easy The tough part came later—long after the deals had been signed and the checks cashed—when he had to sit in a screening room with his international clients as the film he’d sold them unspooled. “I used to just cringe,” he says. “I remember this one Rutger Hauer movie, Precious Fred. The acting was abominable. And can you imagine a sci-fi movie made on the cheap? My God. Of course, nobody was expecting Braveheart, but I remember the credits came on and there was just complete silence.”

After stints at various small distributors, King went into business for himself. His first big coup was Rent-a Kid, a breezy TV movie starring Leslie Nielsen that he bought for $1 million. When the proceeds from flipping the film to some 80 countries were tallied, the final take for King’s company, the unassumingly named Initial Entertainment Group (IEG), was “like four-and-a-half, five million,” he says. “We made a fortune on that film. And after that, we were off to the races.”

Eager to have a hand in more ambitious, riskier films, King financed the Robert Altman farce Dr. T & the Women, a black comedy called Very Bad Things and put up a minimum guarantee for the HBO abortion drama If These Walls Could Talk. And after IEG was purchased by a German conglomerate, bringing in some much needed capital, he gambled the company’s fortunes on Gangs, the long-gestating labor of love by the director he’d most idolized as a movie-obsessed youngster. While the elaborate production was under way, King sold off the rights, country by country, and recouped his money. (He declined, politely but firmly, to increase his investment when the budget began to grow.) The greater challenge was reassuring jittery clients that the film was in no way the train wreck it was being described as in the press. Fortunately, while Gangs dragged on, King also financed Traffic and Ali, which helped to shore up his credibility, but only to a point.

“The pressure was enormous,” he says, spearing a forkful of scrambled eggs. “I sold Gangs in 1999, and it didn’t come out until 2002. And I have to tell you, it was a nightmare for me, not only dealing with Harvey, dealing with Marty—people who are, frankly, out of my league—but getting these calls every day from Finland, from Australia: ‘What the hell is going on? Where’s our movie? When’s it f—ing coming?’ A lot of people put their companies on the line, paying record amounts for this DiCaprio movie, and they were really worried.”

Eventually, King persuaded Weinstein and Scorsese to screen a sample reel for his clients and the press at the Cannes Film Festival. “Driving down from the Hotel du Cap to present it, I was in the car with Leo, and I was just so nervous,” he recalls. “Leo was like, ‘Hey, chill out. Come on.’ And I was like, ‘You don’t understand. These guys are going to run me out of town if they don’t like what they see.’”

The footage was a hit. “Everybody loved it. Except the Germans, and I was fine with that,” King says with a smile. “The Japanese were hugging me. ‘Worth waiting for!’ It was fabulous.”

In the meantime, as a result of the rapport King had developed with DiCaprio, he decided to fund file actor’s production company, Appian Way Together, they selected The Aviator as their first project and enlisted Scorsese to direct, despite his budget-busting reputation. “I can’t tell you the amount of people who said, ‘You are crazy This guy’s going to bankrupt you,’” King remembers. “I mean, Marty’s notorious for going over.”

King addressed the issue head-on: “I said, ‘Marry, look me in the eye and tell me you can’t make the schedule. Because the whole world is telling me you can’t, but I think you can. I believe in you, but I want to hear it from you.’ He said, ‘I can do it, but you have to help me.’ And I said, ‘I’m there.’”

The director praises King’s “calming influence” on the Aviator set. “It was just this gentle guidance,” Scorsese says. “It was a very pressurized situation—it always is—and he just had a solid way about him that relaxed things so we could make decisions. He’s quiet, but at the same time, he’s a very no-nonsense kind of guy. You had a feeling everything was all right when he was on the set, and that’s not how it always is.”

In the end, the 90-day shooting schedule went over by just two days—that, despite California wildfires that delayed filming and damaged equipment. “We were shooting in San Bernadino at the airport, and planes were taking off every, 20 minutes with water to go put out the fires,” King recalls. “So we had to shoot within that window I remember we broke for lunch, and when we got back the winds had shifted and the whole sky, was black. Cinders were falling from the sky.”

Currently in postproduction, The Aviator tells the story of how the fabled industrial tycoon Howard Hughes went from bold aeronautical visionary, babe magnet and renegade filmmaker to paranoid, germ-phobic recluse. In one early scene that undoubtedly holds a certain resonance for King, the young Hughes is trying to rent a few studio cameras to shoot the dogfight sequences for his World War I film Hell’s Angels. (At this point, he already has 24 cameras, but only with 26 can he be assured of the coverage he needs.) After Louis B. Mayer not only rebuffs him but also brusquely suggests he leave filmmaking to the professionals, Hughes confides in a colleague: “My name depends on this picture. If it doesn’t work, I’m back to Houston with my tail between my legs, making goddamn drill bits for the rest of my life.”

“This is a man who wanted to achieve something that hadn’t been done before, and I definitely related to that,” King admits. “I’m a small little independent production and distribution company that wants to make big, groundbreaking movies. It’s not just about success but about being noted for something.”

Yet as with Hughes, many in Hollywood remain skeptical that King’s go-for-broke gambles will keep paying off. “They want to see me fail,” King says with a shrug, mentioning a reporter who nicknamed him “the suicide King” in a trade article not long ago. “But the more people say I’m stupid, the more it drives me to do it.” Indeed, in addition to Accidental Husband and Rebecca Miller’s forthcoming film, Rose and the Stroke, King is helping to finance Lasse Hallstrom’s Robert Redford-Jennifer Lopez drama An Unfinished Life and also Laws of Attraction, a romantic comedy starring Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan. He is in talks to produce a Robert De Niro—directed spy picture, The Good Shepherd.

But he’s keeping things in perspective. “I’m not going to get too carried away,” he insists with a chuckle. “Let’s put it this way: I won’t be directing any time soon.”

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