Friday was a good day.  My first work meeting of the trip with the very cool Trevor Macy of Intrepid Pictures, and his even more cool dog Dixon.

Intrepid are a relatively new US shingle, 6 pictures and 4 years into its life, it has a co-financing/distribution deal with Rogue and specialises in comedy, thriller, action and horror – with a strong teen bias. Trevor, his partner Marc D. Evans and their team of 10 have a big focus on development, like comic books and superheroes and have a reputation for doing smart, tough deals with talent.

In all material details, that description sounds like an uncanny parallel with Slingshot, and indeed we did find lots of common ground in taste and approach and have agreed to look for things to do together.

But Intrepid has three distinct and important points of difference from Slingshot:

1. Their average budgets are $20m to our $2m (OK, we’ll get there… I’ve also begun to realise that on the assumption of competence and having distribution deals in place, its actually lower risk to spend $20m on a movie than it is to spend $2m – I’ll write more on that thought later)
2.  They have just had a major hit, their first, with STRANGERS (and hopefully TORMENTED will even up that parallel)

3. (and this is the kicker) When I walked out of Trevor’s office and turned right, this is what I saw:

Turns out sunsets make everything better to. Slingshot Santa Monica, soon, baby, soon.

Second highlight of the day was finally making it to the legendary Largo and seeing the equally legendary Jon Brion live.  Or actually, making it to the new Largo, cause the legendary one closed last year, but my feel is the new one will become a legend soon enough.
OK, so fair enough, Office Huang, Department of Homeland Security, and all the staff in Secondary Inspections LAX: if I owned a place this cool, maybe I’d be quite fussy about my door policy also.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 01:12 and is filed under Arvind Updates, Blog, Reading, Writing, Viewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.