Anonymous Content’s David Levine & Nick Shumaker Talk Robust Fall Festival Line-Up Including ‘Disclaimer’ & ‘Nickel Boys’ & How The Company Is Finding Its Identity After A Period Of Change
EXCLUSIVE: With the fall festival season well underway, Anonymous Content is finding its groove after a period of change.
The company worked on a slew of projects that launched at the Venice Film Festival, including the first four episodes of Alfonso Curarón’s limited series Disclaimer with Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, a project produced via its production arm AC Studios. There was also Liz Lo’s documentary Mistress Dispeller, which it exec produced, and Vermiglio, an Italian World War II film that it is co-selling with Charades.
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Meanwhile, Telluride saw the debut of Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which Anonymous produced with Plan B Entertainment and Louverture Films.
And there’s more to come with the Julie Delpy-directed Meet the Barbarians set for a Gala premiere in Toronto and Brett Story and Steve Maing’s doc Union, which is set to premiere at the New York Film Festival. (Nickel Boys will open NYFF while Mistress Dispeller and Vermiglio are also screening at TIFF).
For Anonymous Chief Content Officer David Levine and Nick Shumaker, the head of the company’s sales and finance division AC Independent, it’s a slate that they say is reflective of the types of projects Anonymous has been carefully trying to build across the last few years as the company has navigated its position in an ever-changing independent marketplace.
“The thing that all of these projects represent is that they are all great work by the amazing filmmakers we are working with,” Levine tells Deadline. “We’re creating a path of how we work in the movie business as opposed to just trying to react to it and we’ve been looking at how to get ahead of it, whilst also serving it.”
Shumaker adds: “To be able to embolden these voices in what is a tough economic time for independent films feels pretty good.”
Indeed, it has been a tumultuous economic few years in the indie marketplace and Anonymous – a company that has long been synonymous with director-driven, prestige indie fare – has had its own choppy waters to navigate. The year before the pandemic hit, Anonymous founder and CEO Steve Golin – one of the most revered film and TV producers in the business – passed away, leaving an indelible mark on the management, production and commercial powerhouse.
Golin produced Oscar-winning film Spotlight as well as exec producing shows such as True Detective and Mr. Robot. A few years prior to his death, he helped Anonymous get substantial backing from Emerson Collective, the organization led by Laurene Powell Jobs. Former HBO veteran Levine, who also worked on True Detective and as well as hits like Game of Thrones, Sharp Objects and Westworld, was hired just a few months before Golin’s death and what becomes evident when speaking to him is that keeping Golin’s legacy alive at Anonymous is hugely important.
“The common theme for us when we look at each film is who is making it and whether or not it’s interesting and if it closely aligns with the history of the company,” says Levine, adding that Golin’s pattern was to be a “perfect partner to people by not just taking what they have, but giving what you have back.”
To boot, Anonymous has, rather unusually, been operating without a CEO for 18 months since the surprise resignation of Dawn Olmstead in March 2023. This was followed by a public dispute with former employer Keith Redmon, who sued Anonymous last year for breach of contract, claiming he was owed “millions” for unpaid compensation. That dispute was shortly settled that same month.
But this hasn’t curtailed momentum within the company as it forges its path in the independent arena. A source close to the situation noted that the divisional leaders are overseeing the company’s day-to-day operations since Olmstead departed last year and that the board has “absolute confidence in the existing leadership team.”
“It’s been great to have Emerson believe in us,” says Levine. “We feel incredible support from them, and we’ve shone with that support because you can see that we’ve been very fortunate with the path we’ve taken so far. It has borne fruit in each area of the company, from the film side to the doc side, to the TV side and internationally. We just want to keep pursuing in this direction.”
From the AC Studio side, Levine has been carefully building Anonymous’ production output across the last three years with Cuarón’s Disclaimer, which Golin exec produced, a good example of the fare they want to deliver – cinematic and with a unique vision. Additional productions on the lineup include Jessica Chastain starrer and limited series The Savant with Apple, which it’s producing with Fifth Season, Apple TV+ series Time Bandits with Taika Waititi, Jermaine Clement and Iain Morris, as well as Florence Pugh and Christopher Abbot starrer East of Eden for Netflix. Additionally, it’s got JD Dillard’s upcoming Neuromancer, a 10-episode drama, which Levine says is “the biggest production we’ve launched.”
There are also film projects such as James Morosini’s psychological horror film Mommy’s Home, which Anonymous is exec producing for Lionsgate as well as a film adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures starring Sally Field, which Anonymous is producing for Netflix.
Building up
In the last few years, Anonymous has been engaging with the global industry in a multitude of different ways whether it be via AC Studios, its burgeoning sales and finance division AC Independent, which longtime producer and former UTA talent agent Shumaker steers, its international division, headed up by former Bron Studios exec David Davoli or via its management arm.
“There’s a variety of films and they are definitely driven by the person who is wanting to make them,” says Levine. “The value set is cinema first – even if it’s in TV or doc. It’s not that it’s director over writer or even that it’s director over concept. It’s more that it’s just vision over concept. Whoever the vision comes from, which is often who is going to execute it, is who we are backing.”
On the international side, Davoli has been building out the company’s footprint. There’s its UK film and TV production joint venture with Casarotto Ramsay & Associates and United Agents, dubbed Chapter One AC, which has produced projects such as Jack Thorne-penned Best Interests starring Sharon Horgan for BBC1 and Boy Swallows Universe, an adaptation of Trent Dalton’s Australian novel, for Netflix.
There are also deals with France’s Federation Studios and Spanish outfit Moreno Films as well as Anonymous Content Nordic, which the company launched with The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum. The company is looking to expand its international reach even more with new ventures planned in Poland, Germany and Australia.
On the sales and financing side of the business, Shumaker says the slate in its first year initially focused on “director-driven documentaries.” Now, he says, “that market has become specific in terms of the habits of buyers, and I think everybody knows that at this point.”
It has a raft of docs in post-production, ranging from Alex Gibney’s hot project Musk about the businessman and investor Elon Musk to John Dower-directed The Balloonists about an unlikely duo of aeronauts to Raoul Peck’s George Orwell documentary, which Neon is releasing in the U.S.
“The intention was never just to be involved in documentaries only,” he says. “Oftentimes the films you want to work on take a while to gestate and build. But now we’ve seen an ascension in our line up.”
He points to the untitled David Mich?d feature of women’s boxing champion Christy Martin which stars Sydney Sweeney and was launched in Cannes this year as being “the first one in many to come with our AC Studio banner working in synchronicity with the films they’ve developed going to market as well – and that doesn’t happen overnight.”
Shumaker, says Levine, has been key in showing Anonymous “there are different paths for each movie. “If you want to develop movies just for the American marketplace, which has not entirely been our business historically as we’ve definitely made these all over the world– you need to understand all the people in it,” says Levine.
“So, we look at things asking, ‘Can we be an American partner?’ which is an unusual idea – not a distribution partner but a complementary partner to all the smart, high-end movies that are intending to be made so that when the movies that come from our slate are similar to those, we have all the relationships in place to go backwards and share backwards everything we’ve come up with for them, so it’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Anonymous has even supported distribution in territories like the UK, where it invested in the release of Altitude’s Talk to Me and it co-bought UK rights to last year’s Best Animated Feature The Boy and the Heron with Elysian Film Group and Bleecker Street.
In Cannes this year, Anonymous also launched Lofty Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son, starring Nicolas Cage and FKA Twigs, a story inspired by the Gospel of Thomas that tells the dark tale of a family hiding out in Roman Egypt. “That was a third-party film that came in before cast was attached,” says Shumaker of the project. “Frankly, I’ve always been a huge fan of the Gospel of Thomas and who doesn’t want to make a film about Jesus being tempted by the devil?”
Anonymous is exec producing that film with Goodfellas overseeing international sales. Nathan, who was known for his acclaimed doc 12 O’Clock Boys, made his feature debut with Harka in 2022, which screened in Un Certain Regard in Cannes and was also produced by Anonymous.
“It felt like a natural fit to the films historically that we’ve done, which is make unpredictable projects that can find an audience,” says Shumaker. “It’s finding the right balance between third-party projects that we get involved with and understanding that a lot of time can be occupied on bringing to life what David has been working on for the last three years.”
The company also boarded Ukrainian writer-director Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s upcoming war crime drama Occupation as a producer and will co-produce with AR Content’s Alexander Rodnyansky. “We are story-oriented,” says Shumaker. “So, we try to find ways to bring stories to life regardless of where they come from, and Occupation is a great example of this.”
Ultimately, Levine and Shumaker say they “take stock of a film’s need”, when deciding how they board a project, whether it be through sales, financing gap or production.
“We’re really conscious of the fact that our clients need the freedom to work how they want to work,” says Levine. “And I think because we’re a representation company, we approach the work as freedom and then we try to find the opportunity.
“And the reason why we’re so diversified is because everyone will provide different opportunities. The goal for us is to talk to everyone, see the opportunity they are providing and give the artists the best choice and hopefully choice allows for the best movie to be made.”
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