Robert Shaye | |
---|---|
Born | Robert Kenneth Shaye March 4, 1939 |
Alma mater | University of Michigan Columbia Law School |
Occupation(s) | Film producer, film director, writer, actor |
Years active | 1963–present |
Known for | Founder of New Line Cinema |
Notable work | The Lord of the Rings |
Spouse | Eva G. Lindstern (m. 1970) |
Children | 2 |
Relatives | Lin Shaye (sister) |
Robert Kenneth Shaye (born March 4, 1939) is an American businessman, film producer, actor, director, and writer. Shaye is the founder of New Line Cinema, a film production studio that was most successful for distributing The Lord of the Rings film series, based on the classic fantasy novel of the same name by English author J. R. R. Tolkien and directed by New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson. He stepped down from New Line in 2008 after the studio was restructured as a unit of Warner Bros. Pictures. [2]
Shaye was born to a Jewish [3] [4] family in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Dorothy and Max Mendle Shaye, a supermarket owner and artist. [1] His mother was an immigrant from Russia. [3] He is the brother of actress Lin Shaye. [3]
Shaye graduated from Detroit's Mumford High School. He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Michigan and a J.D. degree from Columbia Law School. He also graduated from the University of Stockholm as a Fulbright scholar. Shaye is a member of the New York State Bar Association, and he has served on the board of trustees for the Neurosciences Institute, the Legal Aid Society, the American Film Institute, and the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation. [2]
In 1967, Shaye formed New Line Cinema. The company started with a package of feature films and shorts rented to colleges. From there, New Line expanded to re-releases such as Reefer Madness and first-run domestic distribution of foreign films such as Get Out Your Handkerchiefs . In the 1980s and early 1990s, New Line released blockbuster films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles . In 1994, New Line was acquired by the Turner Broadcasting System for $500 million, with Shaye earning more than $100 million. [5] [6] In 1996, Turner Broadcasting System became part of Time Warner.
In 1998, when New Zealand director Peter Jackson brought his 36-minute pitch reel for a big screen adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings to New Line, hoping to turn the three volumes into two films, Shaye suggested that Jackson should make three films instead. Shaye subsequently greenlit a simultaneous production for all three installments. [2] At the box office, the three films are among New Line's highest-grossing and most popular films, earning a combined total of nearly $3 billion worldwide. They were nominated for a total of thirty Academy Awards, winning seventeen, including eleven for The Return of the King at the 76th Academy Awards ceremony.
Independently and through his family office Lemoko Management Company [7] he is an active investor in companies like Brat TV. [8]
In February 2008, Shaye and New Line co-chairman Michael Lynne were dismissed from the company as part of a significant restructuring ordered by then-Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes. [2] That June, Shaye and Lynne formed a new independent film company called Unique Features. The company's projects include The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (Sony/Constantin), the TV series Shadowhunters (Freeform Television), When the Bough Breaks (Screen Gems), and Ambition, directed by Shaye. [9]
He was a producer in all films unless otherwise noted.
Year | Film | Role | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1984 | A Nightmare on Elm Street | Newsreader / KRGR Radio Announcer | Voice role Uncredited |
1985 | A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge | Bartender | Uncredited |
1986 | Quiet Cool | Franklin | |
1987 | The Hidden | Man in Silver Mercedes Picking Up a Gorgeous Girl | Uncredited |
1988 | A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master | Lecturer | |
1991 | Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare | Ticket Seller | |
1993 | Loaded Weapon 1 | Interrogation Room Person | Uncredited |
Man's Best Friend | Mobile Mechanic | ||
1994 | Wes Craven's New Nightmare | Himself | |
2001 | Festival in Cannes | Bert Shuster | |
2003 | Freddy vs. Jason | Principal Shaye | |
2004 | Cellular | Detective Looking Guy |
Year | Film | Notes |
---|---|---|
1963 | Image | Short film |
1965 | On Fighting Witches | Short film |
1973 | The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival | |
1990 | Book of Love | |
2007 | The Last Mimzy | |
2019 | Ambition |
Year | Film |
---|---|
1977 | Stunts |
1982 | Alone in the Dark |
Year | Film | Notes |
---|---|---|
1965 | On Fighting Witches | Short film |
Year | Film | Role | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1984 | A Nightmare on Elm Street | Director: melting staircase sequence | Uncredited |
Year | Film | Role |
---|---|---|
1997 | Spawn | Thanks |
Boogie Nights | Special thanks | |
1998 | Dark City | Thanks |
1999 | Magnolia | Special thanks |
2006 | Kill Your Darlings | Thanks |
2007 | Run Fatboy Run | |
2008 | The Women | Special appreciation |
2019 | Girl Blood Sport | Special thanks |
Motherless Brooklyn | The director wishes to thank |
Year | Title | Credit | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1988 | The Freddy Krueger Special | Television special | |
1988−90 | Freddy's Nightmares | Executive producer | |
2016−19 | Shadowhunters | Executive producer |
Year | Title | Role |
---|---|---|
1988 | Freddy's Nightmares | The Minister |
Year | Title | Role |
---|---|---|
2011 | SpongeBob SquarePants | Executive in charge of production |
New Line Productions, Inc., doing business as New Line Cinema, is an American film and television production studio owned by Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD). Since 2008, it has been operating as a unit of Warner Bros. Pictures.
The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy of epic fantasy adventure films directed by Peter Jackson, based on the novel The Lord of the Rings by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. The films are titled identically to the three volumes of the novel: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003). Produced and distributed by New Line Cinema with the co-production of WingNut Films, the films feature an ensemble cast including Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Christopher Lee, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Hugo Weaving, Andy Serkis, and Sean Bean.
Saul Zaentz was an American film producer and record company executive. He won the Academy Award for Best Picture three times and, in 1996, was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.
The Tolkien Estate is the legal body which manages the property of the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, including the copyright for most of his works. The individual copyrights have for the most part been assigned by the estate to subsidiary entities such as the J. R. R. Tolkien Discretionary Settlement and the Tolkien charitable trust. The various holdings of the Tolkien family, including the estate, have been organized under The Tolkien Company, the directors of which were Christopher Tolkien until August 2017 and his wife Baillie Tolkien, and J. R. R. Tolkien's grandson Michael George Tolkien. The executors of the estate were Christopher Tolkien, who was sole literary executor, and Cathleen Blackburn of Maier Blackburn, who has been the estate's solicitor for many years.
Middle-earth Enterprises, formerly known as Tolkien Enterprises, is a subdivision of the Embracer Freemode division of Embracer Group and formerly a trade name for a division of The Saul Zaentz Company. The subdivision owns the worldwide exclusive rights to certain elements of J. R. R. Tolkien's two most famous literary works: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These elements include the names of characters contained within as well as the names of places, objects and events within them, and certain short phrases and sayings from the works.
Michael De Luca is an American film studio executive, film producer and screenwriter. He is also the former president of production at both New Line Cinema and DreamWorks. De Luca has been nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Picture. De Luca formerly served as the chairman of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Motion Picture Group and currently serves as a co-chairperson and CEO of Warner Bros. Pictures Group.
Dean Devlin is an American screenwriter, producer, director, and actor of film and television. He is best known for his collaborations with director Roland Emmerich, and for his work on the Librarian and Leverage television franchises. He is a co-founder of the production companies Centropolis Entertainment and Electric Entertainment.
A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American supernatural slasher film written and directed by Wes Craven and produced by Robert Shaye. It is the first installment in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and stars Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, and Johnny Depp in his film debut. The film's plot concerns a group of teenagers who are targeted by Krueger, an undead child killer who murders teenagers through their dreams, as retribution against their parents who burned him alive.
Bruce Joel Rubin is an American screenwriter, meditation teacher, and photographer. His films often explore themes of life and death with metaphysical and science fiction elements. Prominent among them are Jacob's Ladder, My Life and Ghost, for which he received the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Ghost was also nominated for Best Picture, and was the highest-grossing film of 1990. He is sometimes credited as "Derek Saunders" or simply "Bruce Rubin".
Many adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, an epic by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien, have been made in the media of film, radio, theatre, video games and recorded readings.
Lin Shaye is an American actress. In a career spanning over fifty years, Shaye has appeared in more than a hundred feature films. She is regarded as a scream queen due to her roles in various horror productions, which include the films Alone in the Dark (1982), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Critters (1986) and its sequel Critters 2: The Main Course (1988), Amityville: A New Generation (1993), Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), Dead End (2003), 2001 Maniacs (2005) and its sequel 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams (2010), Ouija (2014) and its prequel Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), Tales of Halloween (2015), Abattoir (2016), The Final Wish (2018), Room for Rent (2019), The Grudge (2020), and the Insidious film series (2010–2023).
Michael Lynne was an American film executive, best known as the former co-chair of New Line Cinema alongside its founder Robert Shaye.
The production of The Lord of the Rings film series posed enormous challenges, both logistical and creative. Under Peter Jackson's direction, these obstacles were overcome between 1997 and 2004. Many attempts to produce J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings had failed; the few that had reached the screen were animations. Since the publication of the source novels in the mid-1950s, many filmmakers and producers had considered a film but then set the project aside. The series as filmed by Jackson consists of three epic fantasy adventure films. They were produced by New Line Cinema, assisted by WingNut Films. The cinema versions appeared between 2001 and 2003, and the extended edition for home video in 2004. Development began in August 1997. The films were shot simultaneously. Their production was undertaken entirely in Jackson's native New Zealand. It spanned the 14-month period from October 1999 until December 2000, with pick-up shots filmed over a further 24 months, from 2001 to 2003.
Toby Emmerich, is an American producer, film executive, and screenwriter. He formerly served as the chairman of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group.
Black Legion is a 1937 American crime drama film, directed by Archie Mayo, with a script by Abem Finkel and William Wister Haines based on an original story by producer Robert Lord. The film stars Humphrey Bogart, Dick Foran, Erin O'Brien-Moore and Ann Sheridan. It is a fictionalized treatment of the historic Black Legion of the 1930s in Michigan, a white vigilante group. A third of its members lived in Detroit, which had also been a center of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
The Hobbit is a series of three fantasy adventure films directed by Peter Jackson. The films are subtitled An Unexpected Journey (2012), The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and The Battle of the Five Armies (2014). The films are based on J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit, but much of the trilogy was inspired by the appendices to his 1954–55 The Lord of the Rings, which expand on the story told in The Hobbit. Additional material and new characters were created specially for the films. The series is a prequel to Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Sir Peter Robert Jackson is a New Zealand filmmaker. He is best known as the director, writer and producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) and the Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014), both of which are adapted from the novels of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien. Other notable films include the critically lauded drama Heavenly Creatures (1994), the horror comedy The Frighteners (1996), the epic monster remake film King Kong (2005), the World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and the documentary The Beatles: Get Back (2021). He is the fifth-highest-grossing film director of all-time, his films having made over $6.5 billion worldwide.
J. R. R. Tolkien's novels The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), set in his fictional world of Middle-earth, have been the subject of numerous motion picture adaptations across film and television.
Warner Bros. Pictures is an American film production and distribution company and the flagship studio of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group division of Warner Bros., a flagship of Warner Bros. Discovery. It is headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California. Animated films produced by Warner Bros. Pictures Animation are also released under the studio banner.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is an upcoming anime fantasy film directed by Kenji Kamiyama from a screenplay by Jeffrey Addiss & Will Matthews and Phoebe Gittins & Arty Papageorgiou, based on characters created by J. R. R. Tolkien. Produced by New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Animation, and Sola Entertainment in association with WingNut Films, it stars Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Luke Pasqualino, and Miranda Otto. The War of the Rohirrim is set 183 years before Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and tells the story of Helm Hammerhand (Cox), a legendary king of Rohan, and his family as they defend their kingdom against an army of Dunlendings.
"Last Mimzy" is from a sci-fi story that was a childhood favorite of director Robert Shaye. The screenplay is by seasoned Jewish writers Toby Emmerich and Bruce Joel Rubin (who won an Oscar for his script for "Ghost'). Shaye told the Detroit Jewish News that he met Emmerich when they were kids attending a Conservative synagogue in suburban Detroit