Ryan Kavanaugh did it while others only think it.Ryan Kavanaugh Relativity Media CEO, has financed more films in several short years than most people SEE in 10!The dude ROCKS!I study his every move to learn how he figued out to tap into and close these Wall st meets Hollywood film deals.Ryan Kavanaugh seems to have figured out the magic formula. I wish he would hold a seminar or conference to share the secrets of his movie financing sucess with us all.Ryan Kavanaugh ROCKS the movie finance world. He's the one I try to "model" so that I might one day be just as successful.Check out these examples of his brilliance:It had been a long, nerve racking night at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. As a icy snow began to fall outside, Ryan Kavanaugh, the lawyers, and a banker entered their 22nd straight hour negotiating the pact that would begin Wall Street's richest investment ever in Hollywood. Empty Dasani water bottles, crumpled M&M's wrappers, and thousands of pages of discarded drafts littered the huge, blond-lacquered conference table where the four businessmen faced one another. They were reading the latest version of the deal, aptly nicknamed Mulholland Drive, after the most famously twisted street in Los Angeles.This was the kind of high-stakes poker contest at which Ryan Kavanaugh excelled. Even his enemies gave him that. In three years, he had helped funnel more than $3 billion of hedge fund, private equity, and bank money into the movie business. This deal would mean as much as $1.2 billion more for a potential avalanche of 45 filmsif Kavanaugh could reel it in.Red-haired and impish, the 32-year-old wore jeans, a wrinkled white dress shirt, and a pair of navy Converse sneakers. During lulls when documents were being printed, Kavanaugh played Blackhawk Striker, a computer game that he'd somehow figured out how to display on the room's 13-foot screen.Every clause in Mulholland Driveand there were hundreds of themhad to be vetted by three parties: Citigroup, Sony Pictures, and Ryan Kavanaugh's company, Relativity Media. That made for a complex, triangular dance executed by more than a dozen peoplesome in the room, others in adjoining offices, and a few on the phone from their homes in Los Angeles, where it was still the middle of the night.After five months of negotiations, most of the issues left were the sort of what-if clauses common in such dealsconvoluted hypotheticals that spelled out who'd do what for whom if things didn't work out as planned.At every impasse, Kavanaugh practiced emergency shuttle diplomacy. First he'd retreat to an office dubbed the Sony Room, where he'd sit alone, phone in hand, relaying Citigroup's concerns to the studio's lawyers in California. Next he'd head down the hall to a second office, where two young, bleary-eyed Relativity executives crunched numbers on their laptops. Then he'd circle back to the conference room, where Citigroup's lawyer waited with Alfred Griffin, a director of Citigroup's markets-and-banking unit. Even at 7 a.m., Griffin was still wearing his dark-blue suit jacket, his red patterned tie perfectly knotted.With everyone, Kavanaugh played the role of confidant. "I don't want you to be unhappy," he soothed them. "I don't want you to close the deal just to close it. I want you to be happy."Then, around noon, an argument about certain funding guarantees that had been simmering for hours suddenly boiled over. It was a deal killer.Ryan Kavanaugh quickly grabbed a pen and a yellow legal pad and scribbled an equation that took up most of the page. The answer he mapped out made everybody feel, if not exactly happy, at least sufficiently protected.Just after 4 p.m., seven signaturessome scanned and emailed, others scribbled right therewere attached to the final document on Kavanaugh's laptop. He typed in the addresses of everyone who needed a copy, then waved Griffin over and let the banker click send.Kavanaugh summed it up like this: "I got them to a place where everybody didn't get exactly what they wanted; they got what they needed."By "everybody," Kavanaugh meant himself too.Hollywood and Vine will always be the most famous corner in the history of the film business. But the future of movies is now being constructed at an imaginary intersection: Hollywood and Wall Street. At this crossroads, no one directs more traffic than Ryan Kavanaugh.Ryan Kavanaugh keeping busySolid money sources drive Relativity slateRelativity Media doesn't produce every Hollywood movie. It just appears that way.Thanks to a massive slate deal with Sony and Universal, the company received producing credit on no fewer than eight summer pics: "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," "Wanted," "Hancock," "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," "Mamma Mia!" "Step Brothers," "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" and "Pineapple Express."But who wants to sit back and merely write big checks when others are calling the production and marketing shots? Certainly not founder Ryan Kavanaugh, one of the leading Wall Street-Hollywood intermediaries. The 33-year-old Los Angeles native will continue to quietly co-finance a significant chunk of Sony and Uni's slate for years to come, but he is also ramping up the output from his fledgling one-off picture business -- a move that allows the moneyman to flex his creative muscles. A few months ago, Relativity secured $1 billion-plus from New York-based hedge fund Elliott Management, a company with $17 billion in assets, to finance its single-picture business, and is now poised to bring 10 films a year into the marketplace with an average budget of $55 million.That puts Relativity on a pace to produce and/or finance 30-35 films a year -- a staggering number given the prevailing Hollywood trend of trimming one's yield. But Kavanaugh, who at the age of 21 started a venture capital company that raised millions but generated losses and lawsuits, tends to zig when Hollywood zags. While others in the film biz were rattled by recent news that Deutsche Bank was shuttering its film financing unit, Kavanaugh remains unfazed. An insider said Elliott roughly doubled its investment this past week -- interesting timing considering the ominous Deutsche announcement and what that portends for Wall Street-backed film financing."We've never been as solid as we are right now," explains Kavanaugh, who speaks with both the enthusiasm of an independent and the sense of a banker. "Our budgets range from $25 million to over $100 million; we're in the business of commerce and thus don't make arthouse films."Relativity is in an ideal position to fill the void created when New Line relinquished its status in February as a stand-alone studio. Even Kavanaugh's critics credit him with making one particularly savvy move: In New Line's wake, he scooped up a number of newly available output deals, described as five-year flex partnerships, for nearly every foreign territory. That allows Relativity -- whose one-off credits include "3:10 to Yuma," "The Forbidden Kingdom" and "The Bank Job" -- to sell foreign rights and then distribute domestically for the upside."The larger independent foreign distributors are in need of product," Kavanaugh says. "New Line's folding into Warner Bros. left a large vacuum with the foreign distributors, whose business thrives on having a constant supply of commercial product. Fortunately, our business focuses on providing studio-quality product to the independent world, and therefore we helped to fill part of that void."Now, buoyed by even more Elliott coin, Relativity has as much cash on hand as the average studio and is moving ahead on an ambitious slate of films scheduled to go into production by year's end. The projects include the Lasse Hallstrom-helmed Channing Tatum starrer "Dear John," which starts lensing next month; Rob Marshall's $80 million ensemble musical "Nine," which the company is financing (shooting in October); and the Scarlett Johansson jewel thief vehicle "Brilliant" (also lensing in October).With a 10-man creative team working under prexy Tucker Tooley, Relativity is also readying a Jackie Chan vehicle "The Spy Next Door" (October start date) and a Jet Li topliner "Rage and Fury." Even more noteworthy is Relativity's ability to attract A-list talent: The company recently wrapped the Jim Sheridan-helmed drama "Brothers," which stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman. Relativity also boasts a Ridley Scott-Leonardo DiCaprio teaming, "The Low Dweller"; and a Denzel Washington vehicle, "The Matarese Circle," based on a Robert Ludlum novel. Both are slated to go into production early next year.Still, Relativity has no dedicated domestic distributor, a sometimes harrowing prospect in an ever-crowded marketplace. But the company enjoys a nonexclusive distribution pact with MGM, an arrangement that bodes well for the product-starved Lion. It also gives Relativity the flexibility to release its product with whomever it chooses."We maintain very good relationships with many of the studios and will continue to distribute through rent-a-system deals with the majors as we have done with our past films," Kavanaugh says. "We just go wherever the best deal is."
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