How Movie Deals Get Made: Inside Hollywood Producing

How Much Can I Make? — Real Jobs. Real Stories. Career Insights

Veteran Hollywood producer Larry Kasanoff joins the show to unpack his decades-long career, from leading production at Vestron to financing and producing major

Key takeaways

Larry Kasanoff greenlit Oliver Stone's Platoon at Vestron despite his boss's warning, risking his job because he refused to play it safe in the movie business
Oliver Stone coined the phrase 'a touch of the madness' after Platoon won Best Picture, establishing it as Kasanoff's core philosophy for innovation and risk-taking

Main topics

Hollywood financing models and independent production
The 'touch of madness' innovation philosophy

Notable quotes

"I didn't get into the movie business to play it safe."

Conclusion

The episode offers actionable insights for creatives and entrepreneurs on embracing calculated risks,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) So we make movies that are more appealing to the whole world. We can make more money. A lot of people in a lot of countries won't watch movies that are poorly dubbed in foreign countries. AI dubbing now prevents that. I could dub you into any language I want and the AI can move your Speaker 1 (0:17) lips accordingly. Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make, the podcast about jobs and careers. I'm your host, Merav Uzeri. Today I'm talking with Larry Kasanoff, a movie producer, a studio head, who's been behind more than 200 films and has raised over a billion dollars. That's with a B. His credits include Mortal Kombat, Terminator 2, and True Lies, and many others, of course. He also wrote A Touch of Madness, a great book. I loved it. And I have to tell you, it's a funny, easy read, and a practical guide on how to be bold and get what you want. It's packed with crazy behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories. Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Oh, I loved it. But I want to start at the beginning. You were the head of Vestron, and I jumped off my seat when I read that because I remember Vestron very well. They had all the great movies and all the blockbusters. We did well. Yeah, we did okay. Speaker 2 (1:19) We had all of them. We did have a lot. So Speaker 1 (1:21) tell us the story about Platoon. Speaker 2 (1:24) So I wanted to be a movie producer since I was a little kid. And I got very lucky. And out of school, I got hired as head of production and co-production for this company called Vestron. And Vestron was a relatively new independent film studio in the 1980s. It was riding on the wave of home video. Home video in the Speaker 1 (1:44) 1980s was Speaker 2 (1:45) a huge explosion. Streaming is today and stores, video stores need a movie. So my job as a kid out of school was to deliver 80 movies, eight zero movies a year to the studio. Buy them, make them, co-produce them. We don't care. Don't lose money. And to put it in perspective, most studios today will make 12 movies a year. We had to get 80. Speaker 1 (2:04) I know. I thought it was a huge amount of movies per year. Speaker 2 (2:07) So we made lower budget horror movies, action movies, romantic comedies, things like that. All very commercial stuff. And then one day I got a script for a movie called Platoon, which if you're not familiar with it, is a very serious movie about the Vietnam War. And this is not the kind of movie we made. But I love the script. And I was a very big fan of the director who we'd done another project with earlier. And I thought it was just a movie that should be made. And my boss said to me, Austin, you're crazy. This is not what we do. We make commercial rom-coms and action movies. And this isn't that. The people in the movie, by the way, are all stars today. But then they weren't. Austin said to me, you're head of production now, you can do whatever you want, but if it fails, you're fired. And he fired people all the time. He wasn't bluffing. What are you going to do? And so I thought and said, I didn't get into the movie business to play it safe. So I greenlit Platoon. And when I saw the movie at a film festival and they privately showed it to me in Italy, I'm the only person in history to giggle his way through Platoon. Not because it was bad, because it was so good. I kept thinking, oh my God, I'm not getting fired. I'm going to keep my job. And it was so good that it won Best Picture at the Academy Awards that year. Speaker 1 (3:10) Do you remember what was the budget for it? Six million dollars. And who would have taken the loss if it didn't work out? Speaker 2 (3:16) Me, because I would have been fired. And Vestron, I think, put up half the money. So Vestron would have left half the money and a consortium of other people would have lost the other money. But I ran into Oliver Stone, the director. at a bar in New York a few months later, and he bought me a drink, and he said, kid, I always like you. You have a touch of the madness. And I thought, a touch of the madness? The madness is crazy, and it touches a little. Am I a little crazy? Is he calling me crazy? And then it occurred to me, wow, my boss, Austin, had a touch of the madness by letting a 25-year-old kid with no former experience run an 80-picture film slate. Oliver had a touch of the madness by insisting on making a Vietnam movie in the way no one ever had done before. And I had a touch of the madness by betting my job on it. And then it occurred to me that this is what you need to be innovative in any industry, moving around. You need a touch of the madness. And why is innovation important? It's important because the current of the river of life will always pull you towards the middle. If you want to be in the middle, that's okay, but you'll never do great in the middle. If you want to really exceed, you've got to have innovation. And the best way for innovation is with some madness. Madness will help you swim away from that current of mediocrity. And so since that day, this has been my touchstone. For virtually everything I do, the book is about business, but it's virtually everything I do is to look for a touch of the madness. Speaker 1 (4:28) So what happened to all the movies that you made? Are they still making money for you? Speaker 2 (4:33) It's Speaker 1 (4:33) a Speaker 2 (4:33) crazy story. So Vestron expanded when it went public and expanded and took out a line of credit to make even more movies. And then the economy took a downturn. I forget what year it was. And the bank, I hope I don't say anything I'm supposed to say, the bank pulled the line of credit. But it didn't have the right to pull the line of credit. But it thought it had the right to pull the line of credit. And that put the company into Chapter 11. Oh. Speaker 1 (4:55) And so Austin finished Speaker 2 (4:56) the company. I stayed with him until every movie got finished. Everyone got paid. And then, separately, Austin sued the bank. And he won. Oh. And the judge said they had no right to pull the line of credit. But the movies had been, and the library had been sold to Lionsgate. Speaker 1 (5:12) Oh, okay. Okay, but they're still in circulation because I see a lot of them. Speaker 2 (5:18) Good movies never die. They play and they play and there's always a place to go. And you never... I produce all the Mortal Kombat movies or executive produce. We're going Speaker 1 (5:26) to get to that, yeah. Speaker 2 (5:28) But I've been to places like Uzbekistan and have no idea that they know Mortal Kombat and they love it. And so movies never die. It's like sending your kids out into the universe. They're on their own now. Speaker 1 (5:38) So later on, you said that you were looking to do the Lego movie and you raised the money independently. So first I want to know, what does it mean raising it independently versus what? Speaker 2 (5:51) So when people talk about independent in movies, it used to mean art films. Artie, New York, Black and White. white dramas. It doesn't mean that anymore. Independent refers to a kind of financing. And so there's two ways to finance a movie, independently or with what's called a major studio. There are now five major studios in the United States, down from about seven or eight. So Paramount, Warner's is a major studio. MGM is a major studio. And these studios are like moving back into your parents' house after college. They pay for everything, but you're Speaker 1 (6:23) under their roof, so they control everything. Speaker 2 (6:26) Or independently, you raise the money from independent investors, independent film distributors in other countries, all kinds of ways. And you control the movie. But it's like moving out of your parents' house. There's nothing in the refrigerator if you don't put it there. So that's what it means. Speaker 1 (6:38) So you have a hysterical story about the two investors from Korea. You are a very good writer, by the way. Thank you. Very funny. Tell us this little story. So this is an example of Speaker 2 (6:52) what it's like to be an independent producer. We were raising money for a movie and a kind of friend of mine who was in the foreign sales business, this is someone who licenses the rights to movies in other countries. He said, look, I have an agent in Korea. He's got someone who will invest in the movie. And the agent in Korea, I don't understand this. He was a film agent slash Catholic priest. I don't quite understand how he was both, but he was. So he brings in someone from Korea to look into our studio and they look at the movie and the guy on the spot agrees to it. We sign the contract. We have champagne, pictures. He'll wire the money when he gets back to Korea tomorrow. He gets to Korea and we see it in the news. He gets off the plane and he's arrested on the tarmac for fraud. Immediately, the foreign sales guy and the agent slash Catholic Greece. Come right over. Listen, no big deal. What are you going to do? It happens. Listen, we got another guy. And we go, oh, all right. So two weeks later, they bring another guy. He talks to us for a while, says yes again. This time, we don't really bring out the champagne, but a little bit. Goes back to Korea. Two weeks later, arrested for fraud. The third time the guy calls with his agent friend, we're like, look. This is ridiculous. And he said, just one more try. And I know this guy for years. I worked with him in Vestron, in fact. So he and the agent slash priest bring back a third guy. Now, by this time, we so thought that this was all just bullshit that we didn't even, we were so rude to the guy. We didn't pay attention to him. And he mistook that for a sign of, wow, they're really confident. They don't need the money. And he wired us the money. And then a week later, and he's in Korea. He tries to get us to conspire with him on a scheme to defraud his bank of the money. We said, we're not going to do that. We do everything. It's ridiculous. Of course, we're not going to do that. We don't do it. The guy gets mad at us and eventually disappears from his company in Korea, never to be seen again. Wow. But you made the movie. We made the movie and we got the money. This is being an independent producer. You never know. And you got to. And the question is, what's too much madness? So it turns out the third time, was that too much madness? No. What if we had to go a fourth time or a fifth time? And sometimes you do. The question is, when do you stop asking? One of the things I believe you have to do is ask anybody anything that will help you achieve your project, whether it's a movie or a. software product you have or whatever it is you gotta just ask us oh Speaker 1 (9:16) you have some great stories the gun and roses about asking yeah exactly so this was for Speaker 2 (9:22) terminator 2 which was at the time the most expensive movie ever made so we got the idea to do a music video which wasn't in the original plan the studio said immediately no the movie cost too much money already we're not no but i didn't take that no and i went to everybody else like arnold and said will you do it And Arnold said, if you get the best band in the world, I'll do it. Arnold was great that way. As long as it was the best, he'd do anything. So we said, sure, who's the best band in the world? He called his brother-in-law, who's in the music business. He goes, and he looks at me and he says, Guns N' Roses. Now, Guns Speaker 1 (9:50) N' Speaker 2 (9:51) Roses was the biggest band in the world. I didn't know anyone at Guns Speaker 1 (9:54) N' Speaker 2 (9:54) Roses. I had no idea how to get Guns N' Roses. And by the way, the studio said, we're not paying for it. But I still called the record company and I went in to see them. And then we invited the band to come over and see a rough cut of the movie. And they really liked it. And the filmmakers in the group, they all agreed on what song would be good for the movie. So then the next day, I went back to the record company and said, listen, we want to use this song called You Could Be Mine. But the one thing is, Guns N' Roses was about to release a double album set called Use Your Illusion, which was going to be the biggest album of the year, if not the decade. And so I go to this record company. And I don't know me. And there's a million of these people. And I sit down and I go, listen, you're