Movies

The Businesses Behind the Show Business

The awards for best film-production-company name go to …

The names of actors and directors are as famous as their faces, especially during movie-awards season, which culminates this year on March 10 with the Academy Awards ceremony. One set of names, however, remains largely unknown to filmgoers: the names of production companies, the businesses that raise the money, supervise the filming, and take legal and financial responsibility for the finished product. And yet those names are often as noteworthy — even award-worthy — as those of the other players.

I say it’s time to give production-company names their due. So let’s open the envelopes for …

Best location-inspired name

A24. The production company behind Best Picture and Best International Feature nominee The Zone of Interest was founded in 2012 by American film veterans Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges. Katz happened to be driving on the A24 highway in Italy when he got the idea for the company, and adopted the three-character name for his new venture. (All Italian highways are marked with the letter “A” for “autostrada” followed by a number.)

Best student-film reference

Amblin. Steven Spielberg directed his first commercially released film, a 26-minute feature called Amblin’, in 1968 when he was a 21-year-old student at California State University, Long Beach. The film was shown to Universal Studios, which liked it enough to award Spielberg a seven-year contract with the studio. In 1984 Spielberg and two partners founded their own production company, naming it Amblin (minus the apostrophe) after the film that started the lucky streak. In 2023 Amblin co-produced Best Picture nominee Maestro as well as The Color Purple, which is recognized with a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Danielle Brooks.

Best code-name reference

Gadget Films. Some production companies are formed to produce a specific film project. That’s the case with Gadget Films, one of the producers of multiple nominee Oppenheimer (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, et al.). “Gadget” is a reference to the code name given to the first atomic bomb, developed and tested in Los Alamos, New Mexico. According to the Atomic Archive, “It was called a device because it was not yet a deployable weapon and words like ‘atomic’ or ‘bomb’ were avoided for security reasons.” Gadget was originally sailors’ slang for any mechanical thing or part of a ship for which they lacked a name.

Best use of an alias

Gloria Sanchez. In the beginning there was Gary Sanchez Productions, founded in 2006 by filmmakers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay and named after a fictional “Paraguayan entrepreneur and financier.” (On the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, McKay revealed that the name was a fake one Ferrell had put on his BlackBerry.) Gloria Sanchez Productions was founded in 2014 by Jessica Elbaum as a sister company to Gary Sanchez Productions that would focus on female-centered films. In 2020 Gary Sanchez was dissolved and Gloria Sanchez became Ferrell’s primary production company. Gloria Sanchez produced May December, a contender for Best Original Screenplay.

Best Old Hollywood reference

LuckyChap. Actress Margot Robbie and her two producing partners (one of whom is her husband, filmmaker Tom Ackerley) founded LuckyChap Entertainment in 2014. The name has a connection to Charlie Chaplin, the silent-film actor and comedian who in 1919 cofounded United Artists to give actors control over their output instead of relying on commercial studies. But as Robbie laughingly told the Hollywood Reporter in December 2020, she no longer knows what the connection is: “We were drunk, and we don’t remember how we landed on it.” In 2023 LuckyChap produced the mega-hit Barbie, which is nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and seven other Academy Awards — but notably not for Robbie herself, who starred, or for director Greta Gerwig.

Best family ties

A three-way tie! Miramax, a producer of The Holdovers (nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Film Editing Oscars), is named for Miriam and Max, the mother and father of filmmaking brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein. (Harvey, of course, is now serving a 16-year prison sentence for a rape conviction. Even a bad person can occasionally create a good name.) Lea Pictures, Bradley Cooper’s production company, is named for Cooper’s young daughter, who had a cameo role in Maestro, which is nominated for Best Picture and six other Academy Awards. And the production company of Moses Bwayo, director of Documentary Feature nominee Bobi Wine: The People’s President, is called Jajja Films: jajja means “grandmother” in Luanda, the national language of Bwayo’s native Uganda.

Best classical references

Sikelia and Appian Way. Two of the four production companies behind Killers of the Flower Moon, nominated for Best Picture and eight additional Academy Awards, have names with ancient roots. Sikelia Productions, founded in 1989, uses the ancient Greek word for Sicily, the birthplace of director/producer Martin Scorsese’s grandparents. Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way Productions, invokes his Italian heritage: the Via Appia was the road that linked ancient Rome to the port city of Brindisi.

Most cross-cultural

Studio Ghibli. When he created his Tokyo-based production company in 1985, the Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki gave it a very un-Japanese name. Ghibli (pronounced gibb-lee, with a hard G) is the Arabic word for sirocco, the hot Mediterranean wind that blows north from the Sahara. Miyazaki picked the name to signify that his studio would “blow a new wind through the anime industry.” In Japanese, the name is pronounced with a soft G: “Sutajio Jiburi.” In 2023 Studio Ghibli produced The Boy and the Heron, nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar; it was the first non-U.S. film to win for best animated feature at the BAFTA (British film and television) ceremony earlier this year.

Best surf-bum reference

T-Street. You may have heard of filmmaker Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) and the Knives Out films. But you may not know the story behind the name of his production company, T-Street, one of the producers of American Fiction, nominated for Best Picture and three other Oscars. In December 2023 Johnson told Forbes magazine that he and his partner, Ram Bergman, named the company after T-Street Beach in San Clemente, California, where Johnson grew up. “We chose that name because it evokes a place you want to be,” Johnson told Forbes in 2023. “Ram surfed growing up and is an Israeli beach bum at heart, so it made me happy when he captured our lack of aggressiveness towards all this.”

If you liked this Hollywood story, you may also like my 2023 story about how the Oscar statuette got its name.

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