Reel power

In 1994, the self-proclaimed workaholic sold his Las Colinas interest and spent his time negotiating foreign distribution for his burgeoning inventory. Two years later, Peter Dekom, a Los Angeles-based lawyer who was assisting him with some overseas deals, introduced Jarchow to the man who would help make him a legit player in the movie industry.

Paul Colichman is the Regent partner who, as a kid, might well have been voted Most Likely to Make Movies. He's literally a product of Los Angeles: He began working in a Westwood movie theater when he was 12, graduated from U.C.L.A., and went on to become the man responsible for getting Joan Rivers' talk show on FOX-TV during his tenure as the network's head of late-night programming. "Hey, I was young and stupid," he explains with a laugh.

Raised on art-house movies, he's the product of the early-'80s indie-film outburst that turned foreign films such as François Truffaut's The Last Metro, distributed through United Artists Classics, into fringe mainstream fare. Eventually, Colichman would go to work for UA as the company's assistant midnight-film buyer, getting such films as Penelope Spheeris' L.A. punk-rockumentary Decline of Western Civilization and, yes, even The Rocky Horror Picture Show into theaters.

In 1988, I.R.S. Records founder Miles Copeland brought Colichman in as president of I.R.S. Media, perhaps the most overlooked indie film company of the time. At I.R.S., Colichman helped oversee such titles as Tom and Viv, a T.S. Eliot biopic that garnered two Oscar nominations. I.R.S. was also responsible for one of the decade's most startling films: director Carl Franklin's One False Move, which was Billy Bob Thornton's first film as writer and star.

Having Colichman attached to Regent offered the company legitimacy where before Jarchow had only a back catalog of artistically bankrupt films. Colichman brought in his agent, Mark Harris, and Regent became a "real" studio; the three men chipped in $1 million in equity and, with Jarchow's solid financial history, established a line of credit.

For Colichman, Regent was I.R.S. reborn. The company's first original film was The Twilight of the Golds, a made-for-Showtime endeavor starring Brendan Fraser and Jennifer Beals about a pregnant woman who discovers her fetus is gay and wrestles with the decision about whether to abort the child. The movie was often didactic and turgid, though it did earn Faye Dunaway a Screen Actors Guild nomination for her performance. And the film was given a theatrical release following its cable debut -- all in all, a reputable first outing.

But it was nothing compared with what would happen the next time Regent got one of its movies into a theater.

The most talked-about movie of 1999 is nothing more than a glorified home movie about three filmmakers who go into the Maryland woods to film a documentary about a ghost and never return. Shot on video for a few thousand bucks, The Blair Witch Project, released through Artisan Pictures, is one of those films that comes along every few years and redefines what it means to be an "independent film."

Fifteen years ago, when people mentioned an independent film, they were talking about a movie made "off Hollywood" -- say, Jim Jarmusch's debut Stranger Than Paradise or the Coen Brothers' shot-in-Austin Blood Simple. Soon came Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape, the movie that turned Sundance into a verb and Bob and Harvey Weinstein's Miramax into an immovable mountain. These films and several hundred more were "indie" -- meaning none was financed by a major studio. This cinematic revolution wasn't televised -- at least not until the films started airing on the Sundance Channel or the Independent Film Channel. There are millions to be made these days selling movies made for thousands. Small films are big business.

This is the environment in which Regent finds itself: Indie fever, catch it! Gods and Monsters was only the tip of the iceberg, a movie starring the until recently obscure Ian McKellen and Lynn Redgrave (and, oh, Brendan Fraser) that got audiences into theaters and made Bill Condon a happy man come Oscar night.

But if one were to rewind the tape to 1997, he would see that things did not look as promising. Director Brian Skeet originally wanted to turn the story of horror director Whale's life into a documentary, and contacted novelist Christopher Bram to write the script. But Skeet abandoned the project when he couldn't get anyone interested in financing it. Bram, however, then turned Whale's tale into a biography, Father of Frankenstein. And Condon, whose biggest directorial credit up to that point was Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, wanted to make a film from Bram's source material. So he took the book to his Candyman collaborator Clive Barker, who then optioned the rights to it, allowing Condon to write the screenplay while keeping McKellen in mind for the role of Whale.

The only problem was finding someone to pay for a movie about a gay director who dies at the end of the film; it didn't help that Condon had no cachet as a director. So he wrote the script specifically tailored to a modest budget ($3 million) and a tight shooting schedule (four weeks).