ROGER BIRNBAUM (producer) founded the Disney-based production and finance company, Spyglass Entertainment with partner Gary Barber, where they share the title of Co-Chairman and CEO. The company develops and finances all of its projects independently.
“Instinct,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding, Jr., and “The Insider,” starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe and directed by Michael Mann, were two of Spyglass’ early releases along with “The Sixth Sense,” the record breaking hit starring Bruce Willis. In 2000, Spyglass released “Shanghai Noon,” the action comedy starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson, and “Keeping the Faith,” starring Edward Norton, Ben Stiller and Jenna Elfman. Spyglass also released “Unbreakable,” the follow-up film from Oscar®-nominee M. Night Shyamalan, which stars Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson and Robin Wright Penn.
Spyglass recently released “The Count of Monte Cristo,” directed by Kevin Reynolds and starring Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce and Richard Harris. The film was shot on location in Ireland and Malta.
In post production at Spyglass is “The Recruit,” a thriller starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell, which was directed by Roger Donaldson (“Thirteen Days,” “Dante’s Peak,” “No Way Out”). Currently in production, Spyglass is filming “Shanghai Knights,” the sequel to “Shanghai Noon,” which is being directed by David Dobkin (“Clay Pigeons”).
Birnbaum and Barber are co-financiers and international rights holders on “Dragonfly,” which starred Kevin Costner, and “Bruce Almighty,” which will start filming in July of 2002. The director of both films is Tom Shadyac (“Patch Adams,” “Liar Liar”). They also hold the foreign rights to “Abandon,” starring Katie Holmes and Benjamin Bratt. Steve Gaghan, who wrote “Traffic,” directed the film, which will be released in 2002.
Spyglass recently entered into television and recently completed the TV pilot “Miracles,” which has been picked up by ABC. The one-hour drama stars Skeet Ulrich and Angus MacFadyen. Spyglass is also producing “The Ranch,” which is being directed by Garry Marshall for Showtime.
Prior to founding Spyglass Entertainment, Birnbaum, through Caravan Pictures (the production company he helped build with partner Joe Roth) was responsible for such box office hits as “Rush Hour,” “Six Days/Seven Nights,” “Inspector Gadget,” “Grosse Pointe Blank,” “The Three Musketeers,” “Angels in the Outfield,” and “While You Were Sleeping.”
Before joining Caravan, Birnbaum held the title of President of Worldwide Production and Executive Vice President of Twentieth Century Fox, where he developed such films as “Rain Man,” “Home Alone,” “Sleeping with the Enemy,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Hot Shots,” “My Cousin Vinny,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Die Hard 2,” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” among others.
Earlier in his career, he produced “The Sure Thing,” directed by Rob Reiner, and “Young Sherlock Holmes,” which he presented in association with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. For television, he executive produced the telefilms “Scandal Sheet,” “Happily Ever After,” “When Your Lover Leaves,” and the award-winning “All the Kids Do It.”
Born in Teaneck, New Jersey and educated at the University of Denver, Birnbaum built a successful career as Vice President of A&M Records and Arista Records before entering the film business to produce motion pictures.
GARY BARBER (producer) founded Spyglass Entertainment with partner Roger Birnbaum, where they share the title of Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Spyglass released the blockbuster film “The Sixth Sense,” starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment (cume $661 million worldwide) in August of 1999. This was followed by the international release of the highly acclaimed film “The Insider,” starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe and directed by Michael Mann. Both films garnered numerous Academy Award® nominations. In 2000, Barber produced “Shanghai Noon,” an action comedy starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson; and “Keeping the Faith,” a romantic comedy starring Ben Stiller and Edward Norton. Barber also served as an executive producer on the hit film “Unbreakable,” written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Bruce Willis.
Recently, Barber produced “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a remake of the classic, directed by Kevin Reynolds (“Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”) starring Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce, and Richard Harris; and “Dragonfly,” a supernatural thriller, starring Kevin Costner and directed by Tom Shadyac (“The Nutty Professor,” “Liar Liar”).
Future Spyglass releases, all of which Barber and Birnbaum will produce, include: “Abandon,” written and directed by Academy Award -winner Stephen Gaghan (“Traffic,”) and starring Benjamin Bratt and Katie Holmes; “The Recruit,” starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell and directed by Roger Donaldson; and the highly anticipated sequel to “Shanghai Noon,” titled “Shanghai Knights.”
An 18-year veteran of the business, Barber has been directly responsible for operating companies in feature film production and distribution, foreign theatrical, video and TV distribution, exhibition and pre-recorded music and music publishing. His experience also extends to animation and interactive production. He was responsible for building these companies from the ground up.
In managing these businesses, Barber was instrumental in making many landmark deals, identifying and breaking new talent and producing major worldwide hits. His international expertise is considered one of the best in the business with extensive relationships in worldwide theatrical, video and television. As a seasoned executive with unparalleled experience and financial savvy, Barber has also developed strong relationships in the commercial and investment banking community and earned the respect of this tightly knit group through constant and successful deal making.
Barber is the former Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer of Morgan Creek Productions. During his eight and a half years at the company, he was in charge of all day-to-day operations for each of Morgan Creek’s business entities including feature film production, foreign distribution, music, exhibition and interactive.
Barber has produced or executive produced over 35 feature films including the 1994 hit that rocketed Jim Carrey to stardom, “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” and its highly successful sequel, “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls,” and the 1991 blockbuster, “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” starring Kevin Costner.
Prior to his appointment at Morgan Creek, Barber was President of Vestron International Group, the largest independent video company in the world. During his tenure at Vestron, Barber acquired and distributed many international hits including “The Princess Bride,” “Young Guns,” “Hamburger Hill,” and “Dirty Dancing.” Additionally, Barber served at Producers Sales Organizations, and prior to that Barber spent seven years at Price Waterhouse as a member of the entertainment specialty group. Barber is qualified as a Certified Public Accountant (C.P.A) and Chartered Accountant (S.A.).
Barber is involved in many charitable and corporate organizations. He is currently an executive committee member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Crime Prevention Advisory Board (DARE Program) and a member of the board of directors of the Foundation of Motion Picture Pioneers. Barber is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science.
In a career as celebrated as it is accomplished, producer RICHARD D. ZANUCK (producer) commands a distinguished reputation in the motion picture industry as one of its most progressive and honored leaders. Preeminent as an independent producer and former studio executive, Zanuck has earned numerous awards and citations for his achievements in his more than 40 years of filmmaking. Among them, perhaps the most significant and the one that bears the greatest testament to his well-earned stature is the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, which was bestowed upon him and long-time associate David Brown in 1991. This illustrious accolade, given only 29 times in the Academy’s history, recognizes Zanuck as “a creative producer whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” A precedent-setting honor and personal milestone as well, this particular Thalberg Award makes Zanuck the only second-generation recipient ever, in company with his father, Darryl F. Zanuck. Only one year prior, Richard Zanuck, along with Lili Fini Zanuck, took home an Oscar® as producer of the Academy Award®-winning Best Picture of 1989, “Driving Miss Daisy,” for which he also received a Golden Globe Award, the National Board of Review Award and Producer of the Year honors from the Producers Guild of America. Zanuck’s “Driving Miss Daisy” win set another industry precedent—making Richard and Darryl the only father and son in motion picture history to both win Best Picture Oscars®. As head of his own production entity, The Zanuck Company, in which he is partnered with his wife, Lili, Zanuck continues a successful career forged on a solid foundation. Upon graduation from Stanford University and military service as an army lieutenant, Zanuck joined his father as a story and production assistant on two Twentieth Century Fox films, “Island in the Sun” and “The Sun Also Rises.” At age 24, he made his debut as a full-fledged producer with the feature film “Compulsion,” which went on to win the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for the ensemble work of its stars Orson Welles, Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman. He followed that up with “Sanctuary,” based on the William Faulkner novel, and with “The Chapman Report,” directed by George Cukor.
At 28, Zanuck was named president in charge of production of Twentieth Century Fox and became the then-youngest corporate head in Hollywood annals. During his eight years at the helm, the studio recaptured the luster of its heyday and received an unprecedented 159 Oscar® nominations. Three of the films – “The Sound of Music,” “Patton,” and “The French Connection” – went on to win Best Picture of the Year Oscars®. Other successes include the “Planet of the Apes” series, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and “M*A*S*H.”
Zanuck subsequently moved from Fox to become senior executive vice president at Warner Bros., where he and soon-to-be-partner David Brown oversaw production of such box-office hits as “The Exorcist” and “Blazing Saddles.” With the formation of the Zanuck/Brown Co. in 1971, one of the motion picture industry’s most distinguished and successful independent production entities was born. Over the ensuing decade and a half, Zanuck/Brown was responsible for such critical and box-office hits as “Jaws,” a triple Oscar®-winner and Best Picture nominee; “Jaws II”; “The Sugarland Express,” Best Screenplay winner at the Cannes Film Festival and Steven Spielberg’s first directorial effort; “The Sting,” winner of seven Academy Awards® including Best Picture; and “The Verdict,” nominated for five Academy Awards®. Along with Lili Fini Zanuck, Zanuck/Brown also produced the double-Oscar® winner “Cocoon,” and its sequel, “Cocoon: The Return.” The Zanuck Company, formed in 1988, scored a phenomenal success with its debut production, “Driving Miss Daisy.” Nominated for nine Academy Awards® and winning four, including Best Picture, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play-turned-feature film grossed in excess of $100 million at the domestic box-office and with its cost of $5 million now ranks as one of the most profitable releases in Warner Bros. history.
Zanuck followed up the major success of “Driving Miss Daisy” with the critically-acclaimed “Rush” starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Patric, based on the best-selling book by Kim Wozencraft. The film represented the directorial debut of Lili Fini Zanuck, and its score by Eric Clapton became one of the most acclaimed of 1992. Other producing credits with Lili Fini Zanuck include “Rich in Love,” which reunited the “Driving Miss Daisy” creative team of the Zanucks with director Bruce Beresford and writer Alfred Uhry; and “Wild Bill,” Walter Hill’s fact-based look at the legendary frontiersman Wild Bill Hickok, starring Oscar® nominee Jeff Bridges, which won widespread critical acclaim; as did “Mulholland Falls,” a drama set in the fifties about a team of elite L.A. police officers with an all-star cast including Nick Nolte, Melanie Griffith and John Malkovich. Zanuck’s release “Deep Impact,” for DreamWorks SKG and Paramount, grossed $350 million in the worldwide marketplace, making it the first bona fide blockbuster of the 1998 summer season. “Rules of Engagement,” which Zanuck produced with Scott Rudin and starred Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel Jackson, Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley, was also enormously successful.
The Zanuck Company joined forces with Academy Award® winner Clint Eastwood to produce “True Crime,” a suspense thriller based on Andrew Klavan’s best-selling novel, in which Eastwood also stars and directs for Warner Bros. In March of 2000, Richard and Lili Zanuck produced the 72nd annual Oscar® presentation, which garnered nine Emmy nominations and earned the highest network ratings of the last five years. Zanuck’s last film, the re-imagining of “Planet of the Apes” directed by Tim Burton, was released by 20th Century Fox in July of 2002 and became one of the top grossing films of that year in both the domestic and international markets.
The most recent project from the Zanuck Company includes DreamWorks SKG’s “The Road to Perdition,” directed by Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”) and starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Jude Law (which Zanuck produced with his son Dean Zanuck). In October, Zanuck will produce another Tim Burton film, entitled “Big Fish,” for Columbia Pictures. Working with his wife Lili and his two sons, Harrison and Dean, Zanuck has many films in preparation including a yet-to-be-titled thriller, also to be directed by Tim Burton, and the suspense thriller “The Ninth Man,” both for DreamWorks, as well as “Yeager,” to be directed by John Moore for 20th Century Fox.
An Oscar®-winning producer with a talent for finding and transforming unconventional material into box-office champions, LILI FINI ZANUCK (producer) stands out in the motion picture industry as one of its most creative producer-directors. Zanuck established her reputation for extraordinary taste and tenacity with her very first film, “Cocoon,” and fortified her stature with an Academy Award® for her third effort, 1989’s Best Picture of the Year, “Driving Miss Daisy.” Together, these two movies have grossed in excess of $200 million, garnered six Oscars® out of 11 nominations between them, and twice led to Zanuck being labeled Producer of the Year.
Lili Zanuck was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, raised throughout Europe, attended college in Northern Virginia and began her professional career as a research assistant at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. Her move to Los Angeles in 1977 proved to be both a professional and personal turning point in her life when, soon after her arrival, she met and married producer Richard D. Zanuck. At the urging of David Brown, her new husband’s then-partner in the Zanuck/Brown Company, Zanuck began working as a part-time researcher on a project in pre-production at the time, “The Island,” based on the novel by Peter Benchley. Crediting the producers with giving her an invaluable “intensive internship program,” Zanuck gradually became involved with the company full-time, acting as production assistant and coordinating various behind-the-scenes activities on “Neighbors,” starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and on the multi-Oscar®-nominated “The Verdict,” starring Paul Newman and directed by Sidney Lumet.
After two and a half years of “hands on” production work, Zanuck began tapping new, non-mainstream sources of material for the company—soliciting work from never-before produced writers and cultivating working relationships with little-known agents. Her unconventional approach led to her discovery and the company’s subsequent optioning of an unpublished science fiction manuscript “about aliens and old people” which she personally oversaw through every stage of development over a four-year struggle to get the film made. Co-produced by Zanuck, “Cocoon” was released in 1985 to critical and box-office acclaim, and went on to win Academy Awards® for Don Ameche as Best Supporting Actor and for Best Visual Effects, and earned the Zanucks and David Brown the title Producer of the Year by the National Association of Theater Owners. Two years later, the entire cast was reassembled for the film’s successful sequel “Cocoon: The Return.”
In 1988, Zanuck and her husband formed The Zanuck Company in partnership with entrepreneur Jerry Perenchio. With the same perseverance that brought “Cocoon” to the screen, the producers struggled to find a home for another “unlikely” project — their new company’s first endeavor, “Driving Miss Daisy” starring Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman and Dan Aykroyd, written by Alfred Uhry and directed by Bruce Beresford.
Although based on Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Driving Miss Daisy’s” commercial value as a feature film was considered by many to be questionable. All skepticism was proven wrong, however, when the humorous tale of an elderly Jewish matron and her black chauffeur earned nine Academy Award® nominations and won Oscars® for Best Picture of the Year, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Achievement in makeup. It was also named Best Picture of the Year (Best Musical or Comedy category) by the Hollywood Foreign Press and the National Board of Review, and the Zanucks were named Producers of the Year by the Producer’s Guild of America. Honored internationally as well, it won two golden Bears at the Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for Best Picture by the British Film Academy. As successful as it was celebrated, “Driving Miss Daisy” has grossed more than $100 million and ranks as one of the most profitable films in Warner Bros. history.
Firmly established as an award-winning producer, Zanuck made her directorial debut with the compelling drama “Rush” in 1992. Based on the best-seller by first-time author Kim Wozencraft, “Rush” starred Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh as two undercover narcotics officers facing their own struggle with drugs, and featured rock legend Gregg Allman in a classic film performance. “Rush” went on to win enormous critical praise for Zanuck’s unyielding direction and the film’s outstanding performances. The score, composed by Eric Clapton, became one of the most acclaimed of the year with the “Rush” soundtrack being certified Gold and the single “Tears in Heaven,” Platinum. In addition, it was voted both Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the Grammys in 1992.
Zanuck directed an episode of the multi-Emmy winner “From the Earth to the Moon,” a joint production of Tom Hanks, Imagine Entertainment and Home Box Office, a 12-part miniseries based on the Apollo Space Program, which first aired in April 1998. Produced with the cooperation of NASA, this was the biggest, most extensive original programming venture in HBO history.
Zanuck’s other producing credits with Richard D. Zanuck include “Rich in Love” which reunited the “Driving Miss Daisy” creative team of the Zanucks with director Bruce Beresford and writer Alfred Uhry; “Clean Slate,” a comedy starring Dana Carvey and Valeria Golino, directed by Mick Jackson (“The Bodyguard”); “Wild Bill,” Walter Hill’s fact-based look at the legendary frontiersman starring Oscar® nominee Jeff Bridges; and “Mulholland Falls,” a drama set in the fifties about a team of elite L.A. police officers, directed by Lee Tamahori, featuring an all-star cast including Nick Nolte, Melanie Griffith, Chazz Palminteri and John Malkovich. The Zanuck Company joined forces with Academy Award® winner Clint Eastwood to produce “True Crime,” a suspense thriller based on Andrew Klavan’s best-selling novel, in which Eastwood starred and directed.
Richard and Lili Zanuck produced the 72nd Annual Academy Awards® presentation for the year 2000, which garnered 9 Emmy nominations and also marked the first time a woman produced the show. She was honored by The Academy of Country Music for directing Faith Hill’s “Breathe,” which won Video of the Year in 1999, and was nominated for directing this same video by The Country Music Association. She also received three nominations from the Billboard Music Awards; two for Faith Hill’s “Breathe” video and one for “Let’s Make Love,” the Faith Hill/Tim McGraw video.
JONATHAN GLICKMAN (executive producer), president of production, is responsible for the development and production of all Spyglass films. In 1993, Glickman joined Caravan Pictures as an intern, and by 1997, he had worked his way up to president of the company. During this time he helped to bring in such projects as “The Jerky Boys” and “While You Were Sleeping,” serving as associate producer on both films. Later, Glickman executive produced “Grosse Pointe Blank” and Walt Disney’s “Inspector Gadget.” In addition, he also produced the international smash hits “Rush Hour” and its sequel, “Rush Hour II.” In 1998, Glickman was named president of production for Spyglass Entertainment. While at Spyglass, Glickman has produced “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “Shanghai Noon,” and its forthcoming sequel, “Shanghai Knights.” He also executive produced “Keeping the Faith” and the upcoming release “The Recruit,” starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrell, which is scheduled to be released in Fall 2002. Glickman, who is married to television writer Christine Callahan, graduated with honors in English from the University of Michigan and attended the University of Southern California’s Peter Stark program.
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