ABSTRACT
The challenges amid the process of assembling a range of financing sources in order to reach nexus and principal photography are central to the green lighting process. How decisions are reached are at the core of the process and they can go badly amiss, and are further examined in Chapter 9: The $20m Investment Exercise. This chapter then moves into a detailed case study on The Reckoning (2002), a film produced by Renaissance Films, starring Willem Dafoe and Paul Bettany and directed by Paul McGuigan. The author was an executive producer and co-financier of the $14m independent feature, which went catastrophically wrong in numerous ways. Not only overbudgeted, but mistakenly green lit on incomplete financing and sales, The Reckoning was to become a key factor in the production and financing company’s eventual bankruptcy in 2005. Despite a Paramount Classics release in North America, the film failed to recoup more than 10% of its budget from worldwide exploitation.
