The co-heads of US outfit Yale Entertainment tell Jeremy Kay about the launch of their sales division Great Escape.
Expansion is the name of the game at US outfit Yale Entertainment, where co-heads Jordan Yale Levine and Jordan Beckerman have launched their in-house sales company Great Escape, led by Nick Donnermeyer. The former president of international sales at Bleiberg Entertainment is in talks with buyers at the virtual EFM on an initial slate from Yale Entertainment stablemate Yale Productions. Third-party titles will come in due course and for now the roster includes Brittany Snow’s feature directing debut September 17th, which is lined up for a spring shoot.
Levine is an old friend of Snow, who starred in the Pitch Perfect franchise and Hairspray. He worked with her on Petunia in his pre-Yale days as an independent producer and more recently they produced Hooking Up with Beckerman in 2019. “We were just looking for the right time to do this,” Levine says of the drama about a young woman fresh out of rehab who meets a man.
The debut will be one of 10 features Yale, which currently employs around 12 people, intends to make in 2022 either alone or with partners. Five years since Levine rebooted the company with the arrival of Beckerman, a former lawyer, they have barely sat still. Yale Productions was one of the first companies back in production despite the pandemic in late summer 2020 with Tyrese Gibson action thriller Rogue Hostage.
In the pipeline
The next film to open will be Cole Hauser and Mel Gibson action thriller Panama in March via Saban Films. It shot in Puerto Rico at the end of 2020 during the pandemic. “We’re proud of Panama, because it wasn’t one location and it wasn’t a contained movie with few actors,” Levine says.
In-house production Banshee, directed by head of production Jon Keeyes and starring Antonio Banderas, recently wrapped. Yale’s slate include sci-fi Stowaway with Toni Collette and Anna Kendrick; 2020 crime drama Becky starring Kevin James; and horror Separation directed by William Brent Bell (The Devil Inside), which opened wide last year via Open Road Films.
The idea for Great Escape had been bubbling up for a while. Each Yale film was sold via a handpicked sales agent and the partners realised it was time for a change. “We wanted to look at ways we could be more efficient,” says Beckerman. “It’s going to be much better for our investors to keep it in-house.”
Great Escape president Donnermeyer says going forward he will offer appealing pre-sales and completed films, seeking to create opportunities for independent international distributors and working with worldwide buyers. “There are distributors who need content right now, it’s just what is that content,” he notes. “The good action thrillers and [genre titles] will get pre-sold and the completed films are more festival-type content. Even that can be a crapshoot because as you’re seeing the best films out of Sundance are getting picked up straight away by Apple or Searchlight for the world, which limits the opportunities there.”
Beckerman says that while elevated genre films are a big part of what Yale does, there is another aspect to their strategy. “We also partner with multifaceted actors who want to direct and produce,” he says. “We try to find projects that bigger studios wouldn’t necessarily do but that we really love. September 17th is one of those films.”
Another example is Lafayette Pictures, a joint venture with Katie Holmes that emerged as they shot two films together in 2021 that Holmes directed — Alone Together and Rare Objects. Yale backs the slate and the collaborators are developing The Watergate Girl, a TV project that indicates another desired area of expansion.
On the film side, Yale is supportive of theatrical releases where appropriate. “We still like the traditional theatrical,” says Levine. In the meantime there are digital options too. Would they consider in-house distribution? Maybe one day. “It’s a very interesting time,” he says.
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