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There are no gold chains, designer suits or stretch limos with phone, TV and flutes of champagne for movie-maker Gary Lindberg.
And he isn't likely to upstage the Hollywood moguls with their glitz, pizazz and high-budget movies. But the president of Media Ventures, Inc., is bringing major movie production to Minnesota.
Lindberg says it's not a question of whether Minnesota can compete with Hollywood. "The real question is, how can Hollywood continue to compete against independents like us in other parts of the country?" he said. His first major movie, "That Was Then, This Is Now," cost just $3.5 million to produce.
"The average Hollywood film today has a budget of over $15 million, and a film that costs $3.5 million doesn't have to do anywhere near the numbers in its various markets to break even .... We have a cost advantage, and what independents have to do today is to produce major studio caliber films for far less money."
Lindberg, founder of a company called Russell Manning Productions, was doing mostly TV commercials when he realized that all filmmakers dream of making feature films.
He looked at the marketplace and saw that home video, pay cable, network TV and other nontheatrical outlets had become such forces in the industry that feature films no longer were dependent on the box office. A filmmaker, he reasoned, could lose at the box office and still profit if successful through those other outlets.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained; he decided to take the risk.
But it was a scramble for him and his partners to finance the startup. "We started a major entertainment business on a shoestring and so far we've made it work," Lindberg said. "We put in $250,000 cash ourselves to do 18 months of R&D work." And they went to the Minnesota Cooperation Office, a nonprofit organization that raises capital and provides technical assistance to innovative startup businesses. "It took them awhile to come to grips with a movie company," Lindberg said, but they eventually helped us "gain legitimacy in this business." Together they raised about $500,000.
It was no easy task.
"Investors in the Midwest understand high technology; they understand food. If we had a new food product or if we had a black box...