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The Guys Behind Companion Keep Churning Out Hits — and Pissing Off Hollywood
The “aggressive” young producers of BoulderLight Pictures are backing wild projects, making profits, and rubbing some industry bigwigs the wrong way.
Written by Drew Hancock, a journeyman staffer on canceled shows like Suburgatory and My Dead Ex who had been doing uncredited rewrites for Netflix YA movies and series pilots that never got made, the screenplay was delivered to the Burbank-based production company BoulderLight Pictures on spec — that is, unsolicited and without any assumption of commitment by either a studio or producer. Speaking via video link from the Sundance Film Festival, where they were surveying the indie landscape and scoping out potential acquisitions, Margules and Lifshitz say they are driven by a simple mandate: make entertaining movies that would have thrilled their 12-year-old movie-crazy selves — for a “responsible price.” With that in mind, backing new filmmakers with wild projects and bucking the kind of risk aversion that seems to govern modern Hollywood comes down to intuition — and maybe pissing off a few industry bigwigs along the way. Lifshitz acknowledges that preselling titles based on BoulderLight’s track record of success has become a more streamlined process, then launches into a conversational flight of fancy about the fiscal difficulties directors such as Peele, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola faced while respectively trying to get the green light for Get Out, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and the Godfather movies.
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