Caution: Heiress at Work
Is Megan Ellison an independent financier with vision or just funding the cool kids' movies to hang out with them? After producing Zero Dark Thirty, the young daughter of the country's third-richest man can afford to ignore her critics.
By Vanessa Grigoriadis
Few things are as cool for a 27-year-old as getting to participate in the most important film of the year, let alone being the person responsible for making it happen. This year that film is Zero Dark Thirty, from the Academy Award-winning team of director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, about the killing of Osama bin Laden. And the producer is Megan Ellison. Although distributed by Sony, it isn't a studio picture. Bigelow and Boal weren't interested in financing that had even the barest strings attached to the military, as has been the case with some studio films. Instead the couple made the rounds of independent financiers, many of whom found the project appealing. But Megan, the daughter of Larry Ellison, the co-founder of the Oracle software company and the third-richest man in the country, with a net worth of $41 billion, was ready to write a check for the entire budget, which would eventually reach $45 million.
In the space of a year, the young Ellison has become the most talked-about independent financier in Hollywood. Pretty but a bit overweight, with hunched shoulders, she has a slacker vibe. She drives a gray '89 Aston Martin or rides one of her motorcycles, often has a Camel cigarette in hand, and rarely wears makeup. Partial to butch, grunge chic, she usually wears a uniform of army boots, denim jeans, and a hoodie pulled over the T-shirt of an old-school rock band, like Led Zeppelin or AC/DC. She can come across as well read and shy, but then might say something strangely blunt and uncomfortable and laugh at it. She talks extremely fast, especially when trying to make a point, with her words getting caught up in one another, or slowly and deliberately, especially when she's upset. "Megan reminds me a little of John Grady Cole," says director Andrew Dominik, referring to the 16-year-old cowboy who rides into Mexico in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. "She is not going to argue with you, but she's going to do what she wants."
With her wealth, Ellison could easily "dial it in, send the money, go to the premieres" for the films she finances, in the words of Charles Roven, a co-founder of Atlas Entertainment and a producing partner. But she gets off on visiting the sets and tweeting dispatches from the road like "Home from running around Shanghai with Spike Jonze and hanging out with WKW [Wong Kar Wai] in Kaiping" and, while on the set of Zero Dark Thirty, "Nothing like a little sandstorm to bring production to a halt" and "We just had to abort our location due to an anti-Pakistan riot in India." For that shoot, which took three and a half months, Ellison dipped in and out of locations in Jordan, India, and England.
Though the film's set was often tense, as personalities clashed and the cast and crew wrestled with emotionally weighty subjects, Ellison became close with the actors, particularly Jessica Chastain, who plays the redheaded C.I.A. operative responsible for hunting down bin Laden. ("Megan is obsessed with Jessica," says someone who runs in their circle.) She was instrumental in Chastain's casting, texting her after an unreturned phone call, "If I ever ask you for anything in my life, it's to call me back for five minutes."
"I said, 'That's very dramatic, what is it you need, missy,' " says Chastain. "And Megan said, 'O.K., we have this film, and Kathryn Bigelow wants you. We went to your agent and were told you are busy. I cannot accept that for an answer.' " Chastain laughs. "Megan was so determined and passionate. This girl then really went to town [negotiating the deal] to make sure I got on the picture."
After long shoot days, Ellison and Chastain would watch old episodes of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. "We'd order food, pig out, watch Game of Thrones together, and relax," the actress recalls. Ellison also befriended Jason Clarke, the Australian who plays the film's male lead, a spy experienced at torturing suspected terrorists for information. "Megan was so generous, always keeping our spirits up with a good bottle of wine," he says. He and Ellison rode motorcycles through Chandigarh, India, and took a trip to the Taj Mahal together. "Some nights, Megan would knock on my hotel door and say, 'I can't sleep, can you?' " recalls Clarke. "We'd go up on the rooftop of the Marriott hotel for some gin-and-tonics, looking out over the city. She had the same wonderful naïveté that I had that we were in this incredible place making this incredible movie. 'Man, this is it! This is what we've always wanted to do in life.' "
Independent money has always flowed in and out of the film business with varying success, from Howard Hughes in the 1920s and 30s to Keith Barish and the late Dodi Fayed in the 1980s, to Steve Tisch in the 1990s. Hollywood has a phrase for it: "dumb money." But that was before studios mainly released sequels and movies for children. Today, most studios have closed their "independent" arms, and other financiers, like the Thompson brothers, three oil heirs who put up the money for Black Swan, and Richard Branson, who has launched Virgin Produced, are filling the void, with mostly positive results. "What's interesting right now is not only how widespread our equity dependence has become," says Rachael Horovitz, a former studio executive and a producer of Moneyball, "but also that these outsiders are generally making very good movies."
But no independent financier has made as many impressive and hip movies as fast as Ellison. Between 2006 and 2010, after spending a year in film school at the University of Southern California (she has yet to graduate from college), she produced a few films with budgets between $3 million and $10 million, none of which were notable or critically acclaimed (Waking Madison, Passion Play, and Main Street). Then, in 2011, on her 25th birthday, she received from her father what a source says was $200 million, with similar sums soon to come. (The Wrap's Sharon Waxman has reported a figure that is more often whispered about in town: a lump sum of $2 billion. Ellison's spokesperson says neither figure is correct.) Bryan Lourd, a managing partner of CAA, began to advise Ellison, turning her into a "one-stop shop" financier for his directors. It's a great deal for CAA: "Megan allows a decision to go forward, to be quick, and talent deals to have a certain amount of assurance that the movie is going to happen," says Roven.
In the past year, Ellison, who worships 70s directors like John Cassavetes and Robert Altman, has provided funds for contemporary iconoclastic directors. In addition to Zero Dark Thirty, she's partially or fully funded Lawless, a Prohibition-era crime story directed by John Hillcoat and starring Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf, with a budget of $21 million; The Master, the Scientology-influenced movie directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, with a budget of $40 million; Killing Them Softly, a $15 million film starring and produced by Brad Pitt, directed by Andrew Dominik; Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmasters, the director's first martial-arts movie, starring Chinese stars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Ziyi Zhang, for $25 million; and Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, featuring James Franco and a gaggle of former Disney stars. A few more are in production, including Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, the story of millionaire murderer John du Pont; Her, a new film from Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman; and the film formerly named American Bullshit, from Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell, with a budget of $30 million to $40 million—a film that Sony had in turnaround and required her to backstop.
Because She Can
To many of those who have worked with her, Megan is "the Han Solo of filmmaking—you think it's all over and she comes to save the day," as Joaquin Phoenix said, though some also mention that her desire to be a benefactor of great movies is a "vulnerable ambition" and a "dubious title" in Hollywood.
Quick decisions over a meal are Ellison's way of doing business. She sits down with a director, two rebels breaking bread, and says that she's in town to save movies, not turn a buck. Over a meal at an empty restaurant, she asked Bennett Miller which projects he had been working on, including those that were in a state of disrepair. She then tentatively greenlighted Foxcatcher. "We're both kind of awkward people, and it was nice being totally alone," he says. "I told Megan, 'You're making yourself an enemy of the state and a target [in Hollywood], and there will be prayers for your failure. But I can help. I will be here.' "
In fact, many of the films Ellison has made were derailed when she picked them up. On Lawless, her first move under Lourd's supervision, "we'd had a deal with Sony, but after the economic crash [in 2008] they said, 'We're just doing franchise films or small-budget comedies now,' " says Hillcoat. "We did the rounds to every other studio, every financier [The only one that committed] was a French company, but to hit the button, they needed an American distributor. So we offered the film for nothing—a free film, as long as distributors committed to spending some P&A [industry-speak for "ad budget"], and even then every U.S. distributor said no."
Ellison, along with Michael Benaroya, the scion of a Seattle real-estate fortune, swooped in to save the picture. "There was one day left before the talent deals expired, and CAA set up a war room at the agency to get the deal done," says Hillcoat. "We'd never met Megan before, and she rushed over, crashing her car on the way. They held the doors open late so she could make it." Amid the tension, Ellison was calm. "Megan reassured me that she was a director's ally and at a later point offered, without being pushed, to give me final cut."
Now, this was really something: a financier with vision. Hollywood's prestige circles were abuzz. While Hillcoat was location scouting, he spoke with JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson's producing partner, who was "very curious to hear what Megan was like." A meeting was set up to discuss The Master, a script that Universal had financed but passed on when it came in with a budget of $35 million. "Megan fell totally under the sway of P.T.A.," says an industry source, using the director's nickname. "Filmmakers are the greatest hustlers in the world, and they've pulled many people, including big studio heads, into their swoon. The difference is, Megan is literally writing the check, not writing it for a company where they just later fire you."
According to a source close to the situation, Anderson had been discussing a deal with Fox Searchlight at a budget of $18 million when Ellison arrived on the scene. But after lunch at Jerry's Famous Deli in Studio City, she "offered P.T.A. literally twice as much, just because she wanted to, and just because she could," even supporting him in the wildly expensive decision to shoot on 65-mm film, as opposed to the more common 35-mm. The industry was shocked. "There's no rationale on the planet where you green-light The Master over $25 million," says a source. "Not on the script, not on P.T.A. as a filmmaker, not on the subject." The source may be right: it's thought that Ellison has lost as much as $20 million on the project—although she disputes the figure.
As a rebel out to shake up Hollywood, Ellison has clear ideas about the way she wants to be perceived. She has purposely remained mysterious, granting no interviews (including to V.F. for this article), and she gives few audiences to those not handpicked for inclusion in her world. She sometimes prefers not even to introduce herself. In London for the shoot of Zero Dark Thirty, Jason Clarke was with his co-star James Gandolfini at a bar when she took a seat nearby. "Gandolfini was saying what an amazing film he thought this was, and how it was so incredible that no suits were around telling us what to do," says Clarke. "I took him over to meet Megan. She [hadn't] even bothered to say hello—she never will, and you have to do it for her." At the premiere for Killing Them Softly, she didn't stand up to introduce the film at the front of the theater with Andrew Dominik until prodded, and then she stood there silently, in a black tuxedo.
Ellison is not big on Hollywood etiquette. "Megan likes to say no," says a film executive. "She didn't reply to my e-mail. The most powerful people in Hollywood actually return your e-mails. That's the way it works here." Ellison often refuses to take "generals," meetings of credentialed people without a particular purpose. "Something strikes me as high school about Megan's approach," says an industry veteran. "She's funding movies of the cool kids to hang out with the cool kids. With the hoodies and the attitude, it feels too studied."
Ellison's company is called Annapurna, after the famous Himalayan circuit she hiked in Nepal in 2006. (Taking about three weeks to complete, it is far easier than a climb up Mount Everest and attracts young backpackers.) She and her team don't work in corporate offices or on a lot but rather in the so-called "bird streets" above Sunset Boulevard, near Beverly Hills, out of three large homes with floor-to-ceiling windows and upscale dorm-room-style furnishings, including posters of early Bond girls on the walls. Ellison lives in one of the houses ("Megan is always a friendly host," says director Nick Jarecki), operating the other two as her production office. Up there, in the clouds, she has a 20-seat home theater and postproduction facilities where directors hole up cutting movies for months at a time.
It's all somehow very fitting for the only daughter of Larry Ellison, one of the world's great outsider characters in many fields besides software. Once the owner of the world's largest yacht, the 454-foot Rising Sun, he is the force behind bringing the America's Cup Stateside for a second time this summer. (His Oracle Team USA won in 2010.) He is also one of the nation's prominent owners of trophy homes and properties, such as a Japanese imperial village that he's constructed at his home in Woodside, California, at a cost of $200 million. Last year, instead of some random island in French Polynesia, of the kind owned by most megalomaniac billionaires, he bought, for a reported $600 million, Lanai, a former pineapple plantation and one of the eight Hawaiian Islands. Ellison has said his superhuman achievements stem from a place of pain: his mother gave him up for adoption when he was nine months old to his great aunt, and he didn't know he was adopted until he was 12. From that point on, he had a need to succeed, a feeling he had to prove something to the world.
Megan's mother, Barb, a blonde from Oregon, was Ellison's third wife. According to one of Larry's authorized biographies—this one titled The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison—he was initially unsure about marrying her, even though they already had a son, David. On the day of their wedding, he handed Barb a pre-nuptial agreement, causing her to burst into tears. The marriage was saved when her father scribbled amendments in the margins.
A little more than two years later, when Margaret Elizabeth—"Megan"—was born, the marriage was on the rocks, and Larry was out the door before his daughter was four months old, with the divorce finalized a day before her first birthday. Larry has tried to maintain a close relationship with his offspring: he missed one major sailing race, and that was for Megan's graduation from grammar school, according to another biography, Softwar, by Matthew Symonds. Growing up, the kids often vacationed with him, with Megan racing speedboats across the St. Tropez bay with Khalid, the son of Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed. (After the Zero Dark Thirty shoot, to blow off steam, Megan, Chastain, and a group of friends yachted around St. Tropez and Portofino.) But "Megan rolls her eyes about her dad a bit," says a source who has worked with her. "He's not warm and fuzzy like other dads."
As a girl, when her mother began acquiring broodmares and stallions at her 11-acre property in Woodside, Megan got swept up into showing horses. She competed in America's top riding competition for her age group, Young Riders, on a stallion named LioCalyon, who had a sweet tooth for peppermints. Today, Barb lives on an elegant 215-acre horse farm in Oregon, breeding and training about 100 horses, though she misses her kids: "I had to tell them I just could never live [in Los Angeles]," she has said.
For Larry, having Megan and David in Los Angeles is a bonus, and he flies himself down from Northern California to visit them. He's bought hundreds of millions' worth of commercial and residential real estate in Malibu, including the building that houses the restaurant Nobu and 10 oceanfront houses on Carbon Beach. Megan reportedly has used the one that Jennifer Aniston rented post-divorce from Brad Pitt as her beach house.
Megan's brother, David, 30, is also in the film business, and in some ways is more powerful than his sister. (Like her, he attended but has not graduated from U.S.C.'s film school.) When he arrived on the Hollywood scene, around 2004, he was a prime example of "dumb money." An aerobatics nut—Larry bought him his first plane at 13, and the two of them would practice touch-and-go landings and peel-offs in the skies over Northern California—David opened his film offices in a hangar at Santa Monica Airport. "When I went there for a meeting, he literally flew into the office: 'Hi, sorry—late leaving from Cabo,' " recalls a film executive. His company Skydance's first produced project, the 2006 World War I movie Flyboys, starring James Franco, featured aerobatics as well, and he took an acting role in it.
But David came into his own after the economic collapse of 2008. With the housing crash and the implosion of the DVD market, the banks started to drop studios from financing rolls. (Until then they had put up cash, or "slate financing," reducing the studio's risk in exchange for some of the returns.) That year, when Paramount Pictures' talks with Deutsche Bank for a $450 million credit line collapsed, David stepped in to save the studio. By 2010, he was able to raise $150 million in equity, some from his father, and to establish a $200 million revolving-credit line with c Chase. In exchange, he can co-finance and co-produce any picture from their slate. "It's unbelievable," says an industry source. "Here comes this kid who looks like he belongs in a Life-cereal commercial, and he's writing half the check on every Paramount movie."
Though by a few accounts David and Megan are "competitive" and "don't hang out," they together just bought the rights for the Terminator franchise for $20 million. David has decided to shoot exclusively for the tentpole side of the business, investing his money in blockbusters: to date, he's had a role in financing Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol; Jack Reacher; The Guilt Trip; G.I. Joe: Retaliation; Star Trek into Darkness; World War Z; Jack Ryan; and Top Gun 2 (if that one happens, given director Tony Scott's death). "What's perverse about him is it's so easy to get David to commit to a movie—it just has to have a plane," says an industry insider jokingly. Obviously the siblings are on opposite sides of where the film business is going. "It's 'Jack Sprat would eat no fat and his wife would eat no lean'—reverse the sexism and there you go," the industry insider says.
Both siblings used to be surrounded by financial advisers set up by Larry, but Megan has moved some of them to the side. "Her brother is stable," says a source. "Megan's the reckless black sheep." But a source who has worked with Megan says she is her father's daughter in that she has "a real understanding about money In the halls of his jet, she's seen some world-class hustlers."
But Is It Commerce?
Despite her good intentions, Ellison's year has not been as successful as she expected, and though she has had some hits, she's lost tens of millions of dollars, according to sources. (Megan denies this.) She evidently thought that good taste would trump economics, and shaking up Hollywood would be easier. "Megan is arrogant and thinks she can re-invent the wheel," says a source. "She suffers from a chronic case of rich-itis."
As she has watched some of her films flop at the box office—only Lawless and Zero Dark Thirty have been successes—Ellison has wrestled with balancing art with commerce. Losing money doesn't feel good. "Megan has a reputation of overspending," says a source, "but the truth is that, even if the budget's high, she drives hard deals." She has sought to assign blame for her failures to others, and Harvey Weinstein, who distributed several of her films, has become an adversary. They'd had a good relationship—he wooed her with talk of the Oscars they'd win, and she liked his experience and distribution prowess—but during postproduction on Lawless, things began to go awry, due to "the normal wear and tear of who was going to pay for what extra things," says a source. There was also pressure applied by Weinstein for a new cut of the film, to which Ellison ultimately agreed. And Lawless did well—it was a financial success for everybody.
But when The Master opened to much lower receipts than expected, Ellison and Weinstein fell apart. "Harvey told Megan that the film wasn't doing well because P.T.A. and the actors weren't doing enough press," says a source with knowledge of the situation. "Now, that obviously doesn't have much to do with it, but Harvey knows two things before he gets up in the morning: Megan thinks P.T.A. is a god, and P.T.A. isn't going to do more press just because he's asked. So that makes *The Master'*s receipts her fault. And she's 25, so when he tells her that, she believes it. And then he tortures her about it." (Weinstein declined to comment.)
Actions by Weinstein have "brought Megan to tears four or five times," says a source, who adds that Ellison declared upon occasion that she would leave the business if she and Weinstein couldn't get along. But eventually she found her footing. When he began pushing her to make changes to their next movie, Killing Them Softly, starring Brad Pitt—he also moved it from her preferred slot before the election to a holiday date—she refused. In fact, she denied Weinstein a chance to test the movie.
Unfortunately, the film didn't perform well domestically and received a rare F grade on CinemaScore. According to a source, Ellison has vowed not to work with Weinstein again. David O. Russell and the actor Bradley Cooper—who stars in Russell's Silver Linings Playbook, produced and distributed by Weinstein, and will also be in Ellison's new film with Russell—tried to broker peace. (Cooper's publicist did not return messages.) "We did ask her to consider [working with Harvey] in the future, and from there, that's about her relationship with Harvey," says Russell.
The dismissal of etiquette in a town regulated by its own version of it has also gotten Ellison into sticky situations. Last year, she agreed to finance Side Effects, a psychological thriller that will be director Steven Soderbergh's penultimate movie before retirement, for $23 million. The deal was announced with a press release, and Ellison was making offers in writing to actors. But while she was at Sundance, according to a source, she learned that representatives for Blake Lively—Soderbergh had cast her in a showcase part as the female lead—were requesting a higher fee. Ellison hit the roof and pulled the financing 12 weeks before the film was to begin shooting, though she did "give the production cash flow until they made another deal," her spokesperson says.
Things got worse from there: Lively's representatives pulled her out of the film, and Rooney Mara was quickly cast. When Side Effects' producers began shopping a new deal for the film around town, they found that the details of their deal with Ellison were known to the parties approached—highly irregular in an industry where confidentiality is key. And Ellison herself allegedly did not comport herself well: she had a minion deliver the news of her exit from the film to Soderbergh. Today, Soderbergh says, "In my experience, when you're breaking up with someone, it's proper form to call them. When Moneyball blew up [the film, eventually directed by Bennett Miller, was originally Soderbergh's project], Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal called me and said, 'We're shutting the movie down.' You're supposed to pick up the phone."
In the past few months, some say, Ellison has pulled back on some deals, but those close to her believe she is committed to staying in the business. The pitfall she has to avoid is coming to enjoy too much the cult of personality around her. Ellison, who has been known to sit at a monitor during shoots without saying a word—on Lawless, producer Douglas Wick says she was "tactful about saying 'Can I run this by you?' and always welcome in the editing room"—has lately started to impose creative suggestions, which are not always welcome, a source alleges.
"On one hand, Megan wants to give everyone freedom because Hollywood's so corporate now," says the source. "But the other side is she wants to be a player. And Scott Rudin and Harvey tell people what to do all day long—they're players because they interfere massively. That's part of what makes them good, and effective." There's part of Ellison that wants to be an artist. "That's why everyone's in this business, even if sooner or later you realize, I'm going to look like an asshole if I tell Soderbergh what to do. I'm better off kissing his ass and hoping he's right," says the source.
Ellison will have a "much more substantial role" in releasing Andrew Dominik's next film, a $20 million movie based on a grim Joyce Carol Oates novel about Marilyn Monroe, says Dominik. She is "interested in setting up circumstances where she can take control of the [marketing] process," he adds, though her spokesperson claims it's "too early in her career to make that call."
Many in Hollywood say that it's naïve to think she won't succeed. "Every studio has lean years," says Mark Boal, *Zero Dark Thirty'*s screenwriter. "Don't be quick to count her out." Amy Pascal, who calls Megan "tough" and "shrewd," adds that she's never seen a female financial player come into Hollywood at Ellison's level. "And you know what? Sometimes when you're a woman, people judge you a little more harshly. I think that if Megan was a guy people wouldn't be jumping on her as much."
After all, as is always the case in Hollywood, it will only take one massive commercial hit for Ellison to be hailed as the town's savior. And who's to say that's not more likely to happen when you put your faith in great auteurs? It's a beautiful way to live, and it might even work.
"The motion-picture business is not cookie-cutter—it's not a widget," says Charles Roven. "You can do financial models, but that's what they are—models. Ultimately great success in Hollywood comes when you make decisions based not just on things that are quantifiable but are also not quantifiable."
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