Hollywood Westerns William Pohlad Movies Motion Pictures

ON ONE OF THOSE DRY SUNNY DAYS that make the West majestic, a couple hundred film lovers gathered in a park in Telluride, Colo., deep in the San Juan Mountains, to hear independent filmmakers talk about making movies.

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William Pohlad In Colorado for The 2007 Telluride Film Festival.

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Julian Schnabel read quotations from the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Todd Haynes related the story of his successful courtship of Bob Dylan for his movie "I'm Not There." Wayne Wang, a longtime director, told of his years in the Hollywood studio mills. "They have these things called pacing paths," he said. "They go in and literally take out everything that has nothing to do with the story or characters or even any breathing room."

Wang's statement prompted the one true celebrity on the panel to lean into the microphone. "I wanted to share one thought with Wayne and anyone else who wants to make a movie," Sean Penn said. "When it comes to Hollywood studios, they understand money very well. When they want to cut that frame or one scene or pace something up more than you'd like it to be, you make a very brief call and remind them that a bullet costs just a quarter. Then you hang up."

The audience roared, and I turned to a tall man with long brown hair and gray sideburns, who was standing about as far as you could get from the stage. "Did he ever say that to you?" I asked him. A quiet, thoughtful Minnesotan, William Pohlad was a producer on Penn's latest film, "Into the Wild." He gave a small shake of the head.

Penn says as much himself. "Everything changed when this Medici came into my life," he told me after a screening of "Into the Wild" in New York a month earlier. "He's the first producer I've ever worked with where I am the one to bring up the money issues."

Pohlad, the 51-year-old son of one of the richest men in America, looked like a prince in his long black designer jacket, white shirt out at the waist and pointy lace-up boots. In the last three years, he has made a name for himself in Hollywood with his production company, River Road Entertainment, and his willingness to back daring pictures. His breakthrough project began when he read a script on an airplane and told his wife he had finally found a film he was interested in financing. Many others had turned down "Brokeback Mountain" as too risky. But for Pohlad, it fit exactly what he wanted to do: support an ambitious, emotional, challenging film. "He cash-flowed the entire movie and never took a bank loan, and it went well over 10 million," says Rick Hess, an agent at Creative Artists who served as Pohlad's cicerone when he first came to Hollywood. "I credit him with being tasteful and shrewd. He's gone to places other people wouldn't go." (Pohlad declines to discuss budgets, but he says he and Universal, which released the film, shared production costs.)

Pohlad is among a small group of fabulously wealthy individuals that have come from other businesses to Hollywood in the last few years. They have produced sophisticated yet commercially viable films that probably would not have been made were it left up to the studios. "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Crash," "An Inconvenient Truth," "Syriana," "Brokeback Mountain," "Little Miss Sunshine" - all these films were generated by a cottage industry of independent production companies like Pohlad's River Road, usually in collaboration with a specialty division of the studio system. Among these producers is Jeff Skoll, who made a fortune with eBay and founded a company called Participant Productions to make socially progressive films ("An Inconvenient Truth" was his). Sidney Kimmel made his fortune in the garment industry and has backed urban, edgy dramas like "Talk to Me" and "Alpha Dog." Bob Yari came out of California real estate; he has financed "The Hoax," "The Illusionist" and the Oscar-winning "Crash."

Todd Wagner, one of the founders of Broadcast.com, describes these films as "tweener movies," ones that are between low-budget and major studio productions and are "made frankly for adults." Wagner himself joined with Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and formed a film-production company called 2929 Productions. Their breakout venture was "Good Night, and Good Luck." "The -to-40-million tweener movies need love and attention," he says.

Wagner, Pohlad and the rest have gained a beachhead in Hollywood because the movie business has grown and the studio business has shifted somewhat from a production model to a distribution model. The major studios are increasingly devoted to huge "tent-pole" pictures. Tent poles are artistically conservative - "Spider-Man 3," "Pirates of the Caribbean" - and typically cost upward of million to make. A flood of outside capital, often from hedge funds seeking higher returns than they can get in conventional markets, has generated production entities, which have bought into slates of big-budget films.

"For the studios, it's drunk time in Vegas because the hedge money is flowing in," Wagner says. "There used to be a couple of tent poles a year. Now, it's crazy. I understand why they do it. It's the biggest margin and the highest and best use of people. If I ran a studio, I'd do the same thing. It best leverages the infrastructure, and they are really good at that. Spray and pray. Spend, spend, spend. They have got a lot of bodies sitting around."

Rick Hess of Creative Artists Agency explains it a little differently: "As the studios become bought and subsumed into conglomerates - which all of them have except M.G.M. - there's been downward pressure from the corporate parent to offload production costs. It is not just a luxury but a necessity to seek outside capital."

Studios still want to do daring movies, however, for a simple reason: prestige. In the last three years the awards ceremonies have been dominated by movies made for under million. "Actors and directors and writers and producers want to make them," says Laura Bickford, a producer who has worked with Pohlad. "They have a potential award audience." All the studios have specialty units for this purpose, like Paramount Vantage, Sony Pictures Classics and Focus Features at Universal, which did "Brokeback Mountain." Very few of these films pay back their initial investments and the financial results can be ugly. So the major studios have turned to outside capital, in the form of people like Pohlad. Insiders say a typical deal calls for an outsider to pay production costs and the studio to pay for p-and-a (prints and advertising) and distribution. The independent producers often reduce their risk by selling foreign-distribution rights at international film fairs.

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Philip Weiss, who has written on many subjects for the magazine, is the author of "American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps."

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