After helping to get End of Watch and Nightcrawler made, Jake Gyllenhaal is making it official and opening his own production company. The name of his company is not yet known, but he’s just signed a first-look deal with Bold Films, the production company behind Nightcrawler. He’s also nabbed Riva Marker, who has produced dozens of films including The Kids Are All Right, Beasts of No Nation, and The Family Fang, to run his company. Already you can get a sense of the kind of movies they’re likely to make—chiefly character-driven dramas, perhaps with a slight action-y bent (think End of Watch), because Jake G is actually good at that stuff and I’m still kind of pissed at America for crushing his action hero dreams.
His father is a director and his mother a screenwriter, so it’s not surprising that Jake G is moving behind the camera, too. And I always appreciate it when actors DON’T become directors, because the vast majority of them do not make good directors. (Lainey: amazingly Tom Cruise isn’t trying to become a director.) A lot of actors start directing because they think if only THEY had been in charge, their bad movies would have turned out better, and they are almost across the board wrong. So it’s always refreshing when an actor skips that cliché and starts producing, or even writing instead. (Writers are undervalued in Hollywood but the collaborative nature of film helps limit the damage a bad writer can do to a project, and in some ways writing is the best way to learn the business, since you learn all the many and creative ways a good idea can be ruined.) This is a classy start for Jake G’s venture, and it will be interesting to see what his output looks like when he gets underway.
Attached - Jake with Susan Sarandon at the after party for Broadway's Hamilton last night and leaving his NYC hotel the other day.
