Unmasking Hollywood’s Most Mysterious Movie Mogul
The richest independent film financier in the world is a man you’ve probably never heard of. He prefers to keep it that way.
Steven Rales, net worth $11 billion, has two Oscar-nominated movies this year. Conclave, released via his Indian Paintbrush banner, received eight nods, including best picture, and Flow, from his recently acquired Janus imprint, is up for animated and international honors.
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For the past two decades, the 73-year-old Rales also has been the Medici-like backer of Wes Anderson, beginning with The Darjeeling Limited and then The Fantastic Mr. Fox, for which he even lent his voice to its gray-suited Beaver. Since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom, he’s been a full-fledged producer on all of the director’s major features. The pair even picked up an Oscar in 2024, for Anderson’s short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
Rales’ devoted Anderson patronage, along with a sudden burst of other activity within the prestige realm of the movie business, has been the subject of intense fascination among the tight-knit circle of filmmakers and impresarios who struggle to make art house cinema with a meaningful budget. “We wonder who he is, what he wants — or else, how we can find our own Steven Rales,” explains one of them who works to mount projects by other leading U.S. auteurs. “You’d think there are a bunch of people out there like him. Meaning, all the money, all the taste. There’s not.” (Jeff Skoll, worth $7.5 billion and perhaps Rales’ nearest analog, closed his production company Participant — which backed Roma and Spotlight — last year.)
But the first rule of working with Steven Rales seems to be you don’t talk about Steven Rales.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s attempts to speak with the mogul were rebuffed, as were most entreaties to those around him — one exception being his most famous beneficiary. “Over the years, Steven has become more and more and more crucial to me and my own filmmaking process on a day-to-day basis. On the set (and before and after),” Anderson shared in a statement emphasizing that Rales is more than a passive moneyman. “He understands from long and wide experience how to manage and guide a team on a large scale, and he always thinks very long-term, which is rare and valuable. He’s with me from the start — and when there’s a problem: he solves it.”
Rales’ guard does come down a bit beyond the velvet ropes: He doesn’t seem to mind being seen if he’s not being quoted. He’s taken a seat next to Greta Gerwig at a Berlin Film Festival premiere, smiled in front of a step-and-repeat for Indian Paintbrush’s Sundance darling Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and attended the Gotham Awards in support of Moonrise Kingdom.
In May, Rales acquired The Criterion Collection, the four-decade-old art house distributor famed for its restorations and special editions. Among film connoisseurs, inclusion in Criterion is the highest form of canonization, one that matters far more than that of the middlebrow Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
In recent years, Criterion is perhaps better known for its streaming service as well as the gone-viral video series featuring pilgrimages to its stocked “closet,” a storage space at its Manhattan headquarters where the likes of Martin Scorsese, Cate Blanchett and Bong Joon Ho turn ecstatic as they riff on their favorite selections. The purchase, whose price was undisclosed, also came with Criterion’s older sibling Janus, which itself has been a byword for highbrow cinema since the late 1950s for its introduction of world cinema auteurs — Kurosawa, Bergman, Ozu — to the American public.
The previous year, Indian Paintbrush (which also recently financed Aubrey Plaza’s coming-of-age dramedy My Old Ass) announced Galerie, a subscription- model digital film club featuring screenings, discussions and exhibits examining cinema. In a rare press statement, Rales called the venture, which includes Telluride Film Festival director Julie Huntsinger as a consultant, “a unique sanctuary for discovering cinema differently.” A key element of Galerie is the presence of its “curators,” a mix that includes Anderson and other indie film luminaries — from Mike Mills to Pablo Larraín — as well as acclaimed avant-garde musicians (Kim Gordon) and novelists (Rachel Kushner).
“[Rales] came to Telluride for the first time this year [when Conclave screened],” observes Huntsinger of the fall festival. “It was so delightful to have him, and I hope he comes back. He genuinely appreciates watching movies and making them, and he has a really high standard of quality.” She adds, “If I suddenly had vast resources, I would very much like to have the kind of scope and portfolio that Steven does.”
Rales’ long-term goals for Galerie and Criterion are unknown, including whether he considers them legacy brands to pass down to his heirs. His son Greg in the past has worked in international development and co-production at AMC Networks, though now he owns and operates the small Red Gate Bakery in Manhattan’s East Village, which was, according to its website, “named after the idyllic Nantucket farm where founder Greg Rales spent summers growing up.”
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Rales earned his fortune by establishing and growing, along with his younger brother, Mitchell, the industrial conglomerate Danaher Corp., which is named after a Montana river where they’d fished. The Maryland-raised sons of a self-made entrepreneur were pioneers in two now-common modern American business practices: liberally leveraging debt to buy businesses, early on mostly in manufacturing (one of their acquisitions made the iconic Sears Craftsman power tools), and then squeezing them for profitability through cost-cutting. In recent years, Danaher has focused on acquisitions in the life sciences sector, including subsidiaries that make diagnostic tests for COVID-19.
The Rales brothers’ rapid takeover strategy initially relied on Michael Milken’s infamous junk bonds. This, along with their youth, led Forbes to call them “raiders in short pants” in 1985. According to press reports, they loathed the descriptor and have almost never spoken to the media since.
Rales’ press aversion hasn’t kept him entirely out of the spotlight. His 2003 divorce from wife Christine was notoriously “nasty,” according to The Washington Post.
Rales’ second marriage in 2012 to Lalage Damerell — they are based out of Santa Barbara — made him stepfather to Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who is the wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s son Bobby Kennedy III. Amaryllis, a onetime CIA officer turned media personality (she hosted the 2020 Netflix documentary series The Business of Drugs), recently managed RFK Jr.’s failed presidential bid. After RFK boarded the Trump train, she was briefly under White House consideration to be made deputy CIA director.
Rales, himself primarily a giver to Democratic causes, has other de rigueur billionaire interests, too. These include a 20 percent stake in the NBA’s Indiana Pacers (he graduated from the state’s DePauw University), collecting Impressionist masters and gentleman-ranching, having purchased a $71 million, 5,000-acre Wyoming spread in 2023 that once was owned by members of the Walt Disney family. For his part, Mitchell has invested a considerable portion of his own fortune in Maryland’s Glenstone, the largest private contemporary art museum in the country.
Rales wasn’t on hand to accept Henry Sugar‘s Oscar statuettes, though evidently not because the billionaire was being coy. “Unfortunately, Steven and I are in Germany,” Anderson explained in a statement issued at the time about the win. “We start shooting our new movie” — an espionage thriller called The Phoenician Scheme, featuring many faces from the usual Anderson acting troupe and arriving May 30 — “early tomorrow morning.” Rales’ rep declined to say whether he’d be at the Dolby Theatre in support of Conclave and Flow. That, too, remains a mystery.
This story appeared in the Feb. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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