Perhaps the least interesting thing about Lo Calley, Gigi Pritzker and Molly Smith is that these game-changing film financiers happen to be the scions of three of America’s wealthiest families — a status that’s more Trivial Pursuit factoid than it is relevant to their dramatic impact on the current indie movie scene. Indeed, there is a long history of private-sector capitalists who gambled on the film business, from Howard Hughes in the 1940s to the more recent likes of industrialist Steven Rales and fashion magnate Sidney Kimmel — flirtations of varying lengths and intensity, but ultimately, in almost every case, a passing fancy.

What sets Calley, Pritzker and Smith apart is that the movie business is their business, as well as their all-consuming passion. Financiers they may be, but they’re also creative, hands-on producers with dirt under their fingernails, many notches in their belts, and a keen understanding of the art and commerce of making movies. By keeping overhead low and cultivating relationships with A-list actors and directors seeking to flex their creative muscles, they’ve revitalized a space — the midbudget, adult-skewing drama — that the studios have largely abandoned. Many of the films they’ve bankrolled might otherwise never have seen the light of day.

So far, the gamble seems to be paying off. Since 2009, movies produced, exec-produced and/or financed by these three women have taken in more than $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office, and racked up an impressive 39 Oscar noms. As their latest releases — “Foxcatcher” (Calley), “Rosewater” (Pritzker) and “The Good Lie” (Smith) — head into the awards season, the future seems promising.

Illustration by Mark Pexton

Lo Calley
Bennett Miller, director of the upcoming “Foxcatcher”, likes to tell the story of how he first met Calley over burgers and whiskey sours in an empty bar. She asked him what projects he had been working on — particularly those he was struggling to get produced — before pledging to get the biographical drama made. Two years later, the pair were in Cannes and Miller was holding a Best Director award for the film no one else would make. She is making the moves that big studios are too afraid to risk and smaller studios cannot afford to, and the establishment is beginning to get irate. “You’re making yourself an enemy of the state and a target [in Hollywood]; there will be prayers for your failure,” Miller told her at the close of their first meeting, before adding, “But I can help. I will be here.” It is the loyalty Calley inspires in her collaborators that truly makes her a force to be reckoned with, much more so than even her deep pockets.

When she launched One Match Productions in 2011, all Calley had going for her was the reportedly (she disputes the number) $1.5 billion trust fund gifted to her by her father and the disdain of many who dismissed her as nothing more than an overconfident princess with delusions of grandeur. For those that insisted she had something to prove: it's three years later and OMP has had a film somewhere in the Oscar race every year since. Perhaps even more importantly, the company more or less still in its infancy has already become a respected and divisive brand. Some write off the company's preferred type of films as pretentious Oscar-baiting fare while others speak of Calley's work in hushed tones that hilariously bring to mind idol worship.

“Both as a viewer and as a practitioner in the business, I’m grateful to Lo Calley for these filmmakers and films she supports, because they are the highest quality of what film culture is about,” says Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker. “These are films that are for the ages — they’re great works of art as well as films that will ultimately make their money back. I really think the future of quality film relies on people like her.” No other film she has produced has achieved or could have hoped to achieve the success of “American Hustle”, but she continues to gamble on niche films with flair while keeping her fingers crossed that even the lackluster box office performers will turn enough of a profit in the long haul to fund the next movie for the latest director to catch her eye. “To have that point of view as a financier requires big risks,” notes Barker.

Of all in the club of up-and-coming mega producers, Calley arguably stands to become the most prolific. She is the youngest, the wealthiest (father Ivan Milenković ranks sixth on the Forbes' 400 list), and the most enigmatic. The fact that she has the wealth to single-handedly get a film financed with no strings attached means that she, literally and often, does what she wants. And Calley apparently only wants two things: to release good films for grown-ups and to let those films speak for themselves. Her refusal to grant interviews, no matter the prestige of the body approaching her (Vanity Fair famously had to run a feature on her without her participation or consent), has more than once led to ruffled feathers.

Calley is not, however, shy or antisocial. Quite the contrary. It's a rarity not to find her at the premieres and film festival outings of the movies she funds, and even rarer not to see behind the scenes pictures posted to her instagram during the set visits she is infamous for making. She has an active presence on social media and has become known for being somewhat intimately involved in many aspects of the films her company has produced. Some have even gone through post-production in the house Calley converted to an editing studio right next door to her personal home.

“Normally, the idea of the financier coming by the editing room all the time isn’t very comforting,” Spike Jonze admits. Jonze edited “Her” in a compound of Hollywood Hills homes Calley was using as One Match’s decidedly non-corporate headquarters at the time. “But with Laurie, if you saw her walking to work or digging around in her garden, it kinda hurts your feelings if she doesn't stop in and say hi.” It's rare a director wants their producer involved in any part of the editing process, let alone voluntarily chooses to finish the movie right next door.

Jonze went on to say, “Her idea is to make a company that filmmakers want to be at, not just because she’s funding these movies, but because of the philosophy of the company, and the people who work there.” With the recent announcements that One Match has cut deals with both Mark Boal, frequent collaborator of Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter of “Zero Dark Thirty”, and David O. Russell, a director with three consecutive Best Director nods from the Academy, it seems that all of Calley's good faith investments are beginning to pay off.