Senator Films throws its hat into the ring

LIKE any recent film-school grad -- especially one with the acclaimed short film "Jesus Henry Christ" on his resume -- Dennis Lee was eager to make movies. But a directing deal at New Line Cinema never yielded a job, and Lee's "Fireflies in the Garden" script was rejected all over town. "It was always, 'We love the script, but we don't know what the market for it is,' " Lee recalls.

Frustrated by the inactivity, Lee cobbled together $500,000 from family and friends, calling in every possible favor to make "Fireflies" on his own. With Lee just two months from starting his shoestring production, Senator Entertainment rang up the fledgling filmmaker. Senator President Marco Weber and production executive Vanessa Coifman not only gave the 37-year-old more than 15 times his intended budget but also broad creative control.

"That was the crazy thing about it -- they were happy with the script the way it was," Lee says.

Crazy -- and perhaps prescient. With Senator behind him, Lee used his script about a pitiless father and his fractured family to assemble an astonishing cast for a debut feature: Willem Dafoe, Ryan Reynolds, Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss and someone named Julia Roberts. "It was," Lee says, "a dream experience."

The question now is whether Senator will enjoy similar good fortune. Independent producers -- especially those who gamble by distributing their own films -- fail at a hopelessly consistent rate. Besides Senator, 2008 will bring two other new (and well-funded) producer-distributors into the mix: Overture Films and Summit Entertainment.

Where Overture and Summit are concentrating on seemingly more broadly commercial productions (Overture has Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in "Righteous Kill," while Summit has "Brothers Bloom," starring Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz), Senator is trying to carve out a different niche: movies that scare off everybody else.

In addition to the $8-million "Fireflies," Senator's 2008 slate includes "All the Boys Love Mandy Lane" (a teen horror movie that the Weinstein Co. bought and then unloaded) and "The Informers," director Gregor Jordan's movie adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' 1994 short-story collection, whose screenplay kicked around town about as long as Lee's.

"If I was interested in all the movies that everybody else wanted, I could never compete," says Weber, the 40-year-old head of Senator, whose American operations are an offshoot of a long-standing German distributor and financier that recently underwent a reorganization. "I am really interested in getting involved in films that might even be polarizing."