Who is focus features

Focus Features is a motion picture production, financing, and worldwide distribution company committed to bringing moviegoers the most original stories from the world's most innovative filmmakers.

The company's Rogue Pictures label is devoted to producing and distributing high-quality suspense, action, thriller, comedy, and urban entertainment with mainstream appeal and franchise potential. Focus also markets films abroad via Focus International, and operates a sister unit called Rogue Pictures to release genre movies like Shaun of the Dead and Assault on Precinct Focus Features was founded in , but its origins can be traced to , when James Schamus and Ted Hope formed an independent film production company in New York called Good Machine.

Their purpose was to make interesting films on topics that were not commercially viable for the major studios, which had become increasingly addicted to big-budget blockbusters. Schamus was an assistant professor at Columbia University, where he taught classes in film theory, history, and "no-budget" production techniques, while Hope had worked on a number of independent films, including several with director Hal Hartley. The pair had become acquainted when Schamus taught at Yale in the s. At first Good Machine was run almost as a hobby by its founders, releasing films the company had produced features as well as shorts , and a few others it arranged to distribute in the United States like The Hours and Times, a drama about an alleged homosexual affair between Beatle John Lennon and the group's manager Brian Epstein.

The company typically sought outside investors for each project, and most made their money back, an unusual result for films of this type. While some titles were distributed by the company itself, others were passed off to larger firms, as Good Machine had no serious distribution apparatus in place.

Schamus and Hope enjoyed cultivating relationships with artists they respected, in particular Ang Lee, and over the years Good Machine would produce all of his films. It also was nominated for the best foreign-language film Oscar. Another successful release of this period, The Brothers McMullen, was picked up after director Edward Burns had failed to sell it and Hope helped him edit it into a more coherent form.

The company was involved with as many as a half-dozen films per year, including titles like Todd Haynes's Safe and Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking. Good Machine was part of a new wave of independent production companies, and as their brand of offbeat, sometimes edgy films increasingly turned a profit and even began to reach mainstream audiences via hits like Pulp Fiction , the dynamic of the marketplace began to change.

More aggressive firms such as Miramax began to heat up the competition for new titles at festivals like Sundance, while theater owners raised their expectations for ticket sales and asked for greater advertising support from distributors. Meanwhile, the major studios had begun noticing the independents' growing profits as well as their ability to win prestigious Academy Awards, and were swooping down to cut deals with or buy them.

In early Good Machine broadened its scope to television by initiating projects with both HBO and the Sci-Fi Channel, while also announcing plans to produce family films and what it called "uncensored cinema. December saw the U. It was co-produced by Good Machine International and several other firms, with Linde and Schamus acting as executive producers. The company also began work on its largest production to date, Lee's filmization of the Marvel Comics classic Hulk, again co-scripted by Schamus.

The combined enterprises were renamed Focus Features, with Good Machine co-presidents Schamus and Linde put in charge and partner Ted Hope producing pictures for the firm via his own This Is That unit.

In addition to helping run the studio and writing scripts for Lee, Schamus would continue to teach classes at Columbia as well as working to complete a book on Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer. Universal had bought a stake in , but sold it to USA Networks two years later.

After the merger USA Films' production, marketing, and distribution operations would remain in place, as would Good Machine's international sales unit, now known as Focus International.

The latter would represent third-party producers as well as Focus and Universal for foreign sales, and would continue to be run by Linde. Focus would operate as a completely independent unit of Universal, with Schamus and Linde reporting directly to Universal Chairman Stacey Snider. The Focus name had previously been used for Universal's own inhouse specialty film unit, which had been shut down just a month earlier. The company, which would aim for ten to 12 releases per year, would be headquartered in USA's former offices in New York's Greenwich Village.

Follow us:. Most Innovative Companies Focus Features Focus Features is a filmmaker-focused company, a division of Universal, whose mission is to help those artists tell meaningful stories that inspire, entertain, and show the power of movies. Lists Film and Television.

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