LOS ANGELES: The faces are familiar, and the names are too: Chris McGurk, former vice chairman of MGM; Tom Pollock, the former chairman of Universal Pictures, and Robert Friedman, a marketing guru at Paramount when Sherry Lansing was in charge.
These executives, once members of Hollywood’s power elite, are being given a new lease on life as they raise money for various filmmaking ventures, backed by the latest wave of money to come sweeping through Hollywood: private capital from hedge funds flush with cash and individuals looking to invest.
Last week, McGurk announced that he would head up a new studio, Overture Films, to make and distribute 10 feature films a year, each with a budget of about $25 million. In August, Pollock and his partner, the director Ivan Reitman, signed up with Merrill Lynch and two other investors to produce 10 movies over the next five years, in the same budget level. And Friedman is negotiating with Michael Blum, a managing director at Merrill Lynch, to raise up to $1 billion for a full-service studio that would both make and distribute movies, according to people close to the negotiations. Both Friedman and Blum declined to comment for this article.
