‘King’s Speech’ Producers Await Seats at Table
Misha Erwitt for The New York Times
Iain Canning and Emile Sherman, producers of “The King’s Speech.”
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
Published: February 25, 2011
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — The fancier people at the Chateau Marmont on Thursday evening were lined up outside, having their photos snapped at the entrance to a pre-Oscar affair sponsored by Vanity Fair and Fox Searchlight Pictures.
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Hollywood hasn’t quite figured out that the nearly invisible Mr. Sherman and Mr. Canning — one wore jeans, the other had on tennis shoes — are favored to walk away with the best picture Oscar on Sunday night.
“It’s so far beyond what you expected,” said Mr. Canning, a 31-year-old Londoner and one of three young producers who will take the stage if “The King’s Speech” wins the top honors at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony.
“Winning an Oscar would be an absolute crown on all of it,” said Mr. Sherman, who is 38 and from Australia. “But this film is about an audience. The audience loves it.”
(On Friday, the Classification and Rating Administration assigned a PG-13 rating to an alternate version of the film, which had been rated R for language, opening the way for still more ticket sales should it win.)
A third producer, Gareth Unwin, another Londoner, was not at the table. According to Mr. Sherman and Mr. Canning, he is not fancy either, having spent most of the last decade as an assistant director on small movies and British television shows.
It isn’t over until they open the last envelope, of course. Six years ago, “Million Dollar Baby” came from nowhere to steal a best picture award that until the middle of the Academy Awards show seemed earmarked for “The Aviator.”
But Mr. Sherman and Mr. Canning are as close as anyone gets to being a sure bet in this town. By early this month, 14 out of 15 Oscar observers monitored by the Web site Movie City News pegged “The King’s Speech” as this year’s winner. The holdout saw an upset by “The Social Network,” an early favorite that faded as those who vote on the film industry’s myriad awards, one after another, instead came down in favor of “The King’s Speech.”
A best picture triumph, if it occurs, will have been engineered principally by Harvey Weinstein, the grizzled Oscar campaigner whose Weinstein Company released “The King’s Speech” in the United States and a handful of other places. Mr. Weinstein not only promoted the movie, but helped to shape it, particularly by luring Colin Firth, another awards-night favorite, into the lead role.
But Mr. Weinstein will remain in the audience on Sunday. The spotlight will belong to the three producers, much of whose accomplishment lay in failing to recognize how steeply the odds were stacked against them when they set out several years ago to make a good movie, never mind a great one, when the film business was crumbling amid the general financial collapse and not especially interested in heartwarming period pieces about, say, a stuttering King George VI.
Mr. Sherman is teamed up with Mr. Canning in See-Saw Films — it is a reference both to their ups and downs and to their lives in opposing time zones — and in a complex of ventures that helps finance and distribute movies in the Britain, Australia and elsewhere.
The two began working closely on the 2006 film “Candy,” which starred Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush in a story about poetry, love and heroin. The box office was negligible. The film took in less than $50,000 in the United States, according to Boxofficemojo.com.
But Mr. Canning and Mr. Sherman found they were mutually attracted to the sort of films that leave a proud poster on the producer’s wall even if they don’t do much for his wallet. “It’s a passion place,” Mr. Sherman said of the zone in which they work.
As the pair were getting See-Saw under way in 2008, they were introduced to Mr. Unwin, who was trying to make a film of a still-unproduced stage play by David Seidler about King George’s stuttering problem. Mr. Seidler’s best-known movie credit was for “Tucker: The Man and His Dream,” released in 1988.
The usual accidents of indie filmmaking, happy and otherwise, ensued.
Even while they were working on the script, a version was slipped informally to Mr. Rush, “against all of our gut instincts about what to do,” Mr. Canning said. He is a fastidious type who would have preferred approaching the actor with a financial offer and a finished product.
But Mr. Rush was interested, and stayed that way while the movie fell together. But it then almost fell apart as Mr. Rush was pressed to begin a stage play even as they were preparing to shoot and financing was still being cobbled together from more than a dozen sources.
(In a second happy accident, Tom Hooper, the eventual director, became intrigued after his mother happened to sit in on a table reading of the script.)
“You do sniff out as a producer that films have a moment,” said Mr. Sherman, finishing up his cauliflower soup.
Mr. Canning, still sipping his café au lait, added, “I’ve seen films miss that moment.”
Rather than lose the moment, the producers began shooting in November 2009, on a budget that had suddenly shrunk by about 12 percent, to about $15 million, as the value of the dollar dropped in Britain.
By then, the producers had already rebuffed Fox Searchlight, which had expressed interest in making the film, but would have turned Mr. Sherman, Mr. Canning and Mr. Unwin into producers-for-hire. Instead, they had made a deal to have Mr. Weinstein’s company distribute the film in the United States and elsewhere, while they remained independent.
Mr. Weinstein, Mr. Canning said, had pursued them “aggressively.”
It was “locked-in-the-room time,” Mr. Sherman said of a negotiations that put “The King’s Speech” in the hands of an Oscar-maven who last had a best picture in 2003, with “Chicago,” while Mr. Weinstein was still at Miramax Films.
On Saturday night, Mr. Canning and Mr. Sherman will be among the honored guests at Mr. Weinstein’s Oscar bash, at Soho House, about a mile and a half up Sunset Boulevard from the Chateau.
And by Sunday, if all goes according to plan, they’ll have no problem getting a table.
