Leading from the front
Her name is attached to some high profile projects and she has the reputation for being a hard working, hands-on producer with special empathy for the crew she recruits. A big fan of micro-budget projects, Alicia Van Couvering won acclaim along with actor-writer-director Lena Dunham for Tiny Furniture and worked with Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress. A NYU film graduate, her mother is an anthropologist and her father a palaeontologist. Currently, she has movies like Drinking Buddies and The Apocalypse coming up.
Big, bigger, biggest
Basil Iwanyk has played it safe with Clash of the Titans, which earned more than $490 million at the global box office. Then came the executive producer credit on The Expendables, which has earned almost $250 million. To top it off, Warner Brothers chose him to produce The Town with Ben Affleck. Other big movies that he produced are The Expendables 2 and Clash of the Titans 2. “Basil has great commercial instincts and a deep understanding of how the Warner Brothers system works, and those things have given him a great deal of momentum,” said Jeff Robinov, the studio’s president of motion pictures.
Brother dear
David Ellison, the brother of Megan Ellison, is an aspiring Hollywood mogul, leading a $350 million movie production company, with several Tom Cruise movies coming up, and even a nebulous ‘media company 2.0’ strategy with TV shows and new ventures. Thirty-year-old Ellison is not just a producer; he was also seen in films like Flyboys, Little Fish, Strange Pond and ParFection: The Golf Movie. An acrobat and a licensed commercial pilot, his Skydance (production company) powered Jack Reacher and Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol, World War Z, Star Trek Into Darkness and G I Joe Retaliation.
The mystery woman
The daughter of billionaire and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Megan Ellison has the liberty to do pretty much what she pleases. She heads Annapurna Pictures and has worked with directors like Spike Jonze, Kathryn Bigelow and Paul Thomas Anderson. She was the executive producer of 2010’s Oscar-nominated True Grit and smaller projects like 2010’s Main Street. But the media couldn’t get enough of her when she attended the Oscars ceremony, for both Ellison’s biggest, Zero Dark Thirty and The Master were bank rolled by her. She will also be producing movies like Terminator 5 and Foxcatcher this year.
Two to tango
This list would be incomplete without the Duplass brothers (Mark and Jay). They call each other “Dupes” a lot, a little different from the ‘Duplass’ that they reportedly stole from a friend. The brothers started off with the movie, The Puffy Chair, which also saw Mark play the lead role. Last year they produced movies like Black Rock, Safety Not Guaranteed and The Do-Deca-Pentathlon. Besides movies, the two also have some small screen credits, like in Togetherness and recently appeared on Fox’s The Mindy Project.