FEATURE:
Elevated Pitch
IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie/PHOTO CREDIT: Victoria Stevens for Variety
The LuckChap Entertainment Empire, Margot Robbie: Future Director, and Gender Imbalance in Hollywood
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AHEAD of the nominations…
IN THIS PHOTO: Margot Robbie alongside Joey McNamara (left) and Tom Ackerley/PHOTO CREDIT: Victoria Stevens for Variety
being announced for this year’s Academy Awards on 23rd January, there is a lot of attention around a production company and growing empire that is behind some of the biggest films of last year (before that, one Margot Robbie and Barbie are nominated at the Golden Globes this Monday coming (8th January). LuckyChap Entertainment are based in Los Angeles and was formed in 2014 by Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley, Sophia Kerr and Josey McNamara. Recently, Robbie, Ackerley and McNamara spoke with Variety about the success of Barbie and Saltburn. Two recent and successful films under their belt have built their name and reputation. With award-nominated and box office hits under their belt and some fascinating projects upcoming, LuckyChap Entertainment are one of the most original and successful production houses in film. Aside from Robbie and her co-founders seeking out interesting and fresh films that jump off the page, there is also this desire to support and highlight incredible female filmmakers. Working with Greta Gerwig (director/co-writer) on Barbie, Emerald Fennell (director and writer) on Saltburn and Olivia Wilde on a future film, Naughty, LuckyChap Entertainment are showcasing the work of some of Hollywood’s most talented and remarkable voices. I want to start with a 2022 interview from Grazia Daily, where Margot Robbie spoke about getting Barbie off the ground, and addressing female directors in Hollywood. Until Barbie, she had only been directed by one woman - Josie Rourke for Mary Queen of Scots -, even though she had worked with a lot of female directors for her T.V. career:
“The BAFTA nominated actress admits that she didn't anticipate the amount of attention she would get. 'It was my first film in America,' she continues. 'Honestly, I know that sounds silly now, knowing how big the movie became, but at the time, I said, "No one's going to notice me in this film, everyone will be focused on Leo [DiCaprio] and I'll just slip under the radar."'
Through her remarkable career, Margot has worked with a breadth of legendary film directors; from Martin Scorsese on Wolf of Wall Street, to Quentin Tarantino on Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood. But it was noted that in the nearly 20 feature films she'd starred in - she hadn't been directed by a woman, until Josie Rourke for Mary Queen of Scots.
Margot says, 'When that became a big part of that conversation, I was like," I've worked with tonnes of women oh, it's all in TV. "' She explains, 'Every single director I work with has a totally different personality and different process. Of course, Josie has a particular insight as a woman, but then you do something like Bombshell with a Jay Roach, and he's the most emotionally intuitive person I know. ' She adds, 'So, I wouldn't say that it didn't work better because he was a man. When it comes to dealing with those specific topics - it's really down to the person. '
I like doing things that are scary, and Barbie was definitely scary because there's so much recognition and baggage.
A style icon since the 50s, Barbie has been setting trends with her pink aesthetic for multiple generations. Today, she’s still at the forefront as the 'Barbiecore' trend infiltrates pop culture (with 7 million TikTok views and counting.) And who is responsible for the resurgence of the trend? It's all thanks to Margot after being papped in THAT bright pink aerobics-inspired look, whilst filming the 2023 Barbie live-action film. 'It's insane,' she says. 'I didn't know it would get the hype that it seems to have already.'
She recounts that it wasn't an easy mission trying to persuade people on how much impact the film could have. She explains, 'When we were trying to get the budget that we needed for it. I kept saying to boards "This is the most globally recognised word next to like Coca Cola, everyone knows Barbie. This will hit!"' She jokes,' Give us more money for budget!'
But what drew Margot to this project? She explains, 'Barbie seemed like a huge opportunity. I was coming at it as a producer to begin with so, I didn't really think of it from the acting point of view until I knew that it was a goal.' She adds,' I knew the only way worth doing it was to have the Greta Gerwig version - I didn't really want to make a straightforward version of the film that didn't seem exciting.'
While Margot is grateful the upcoming film has sparked interest already - she just hopes it doesn't fizzle out. 'The producer side of me is like, everyone just put a lid on it - we're releasing this next summer, ' she says. Adding, ''I would really love the hype to still be there in a couple of month's time, just not right now. But it's exciting, it's great that it ignites conversation, debate, and interest.'
And while the rise of streaming is evident, as a self-confessed movie fanatic, Margot doesn't think the world should count out the theatrical experience any time soon. 'Nothing makes me happier than when a movie does well in theatres - that helps all of us.' She throws out a question of her own, 'Think of your favourite song. Imagine if the first time you heard that song was live at a concert, or the first time was on the radio. I mean, wouldn't you rather it be live? You'll never forget that experience and you can never get that first time back”.
I do hope there is more written about LuckChap Entertainment. There is a lot of emphasis on actors and directors, though we do not often get to hear about producers and companies behind successful films. Margot Robbie is one of the most successful and respected producers in Hollywood. The fact Variety spotlighted LuckyChap Entertainment and gave us some behind-the-scenes exposure of a wonderful team and company is fantastic. I am not sure how many Academy Awards Saltburn will be nominated for, though you feel Barbie could easily get seven or eight nominations – including Margot Robbie for Best Actress:
“Sitting on a sunny rooftop patio of her Los Angeles production company, LuckyChap, flanked by co-founders Tom Ackerley and Josey McNamara, Robbie says, “When we finished the press tour, I was like, ‘I guess I’ll throw all the pink out of my wardrobe now.’” They all laugh. “But the fact that we’re going to the Golden Globes and all that stuff? I truly did not see that coming. I’m not trying to be modest.”
To house its booming production enterprise, LuckyChap is outfitting new digs in L.A. Today, Robbie’s office, one of the only areas that’s fully renovated so far, boasts a plush white carpet and a rendering of a pink high heel that’s reminiscent of the iconic shot of Robbie stepping out of Barbie’s feathered shoes. Her friend also gifted her a piece from a New York street artist that has a 1950s era Barbie sitting on the floor with her stiletto pressed against the face of a crawling Ken doll — a perfect merging of Robbie’s breakout performance in 2013’s “Wolf of Wall Street” and now, Barbie, precisely 10 years later.
PHOTO CREDIT: Victoria Stevens for Variety
In that time, the company has grown to 13 employees, with a film division (directed by Bronte Payne) housed in one area of the office and the TV team (led by Dani Gorin) in another, all working on the 20 projects they have in active development.
“The office is a five-minute skateboard ride away from home,” Robbie says enthusiastically, while she and Ackerley give me a tour.
Before “Barbie,” LuckyChap’s three biggest films — 2017’s “I, Tonya” and 2020’s “Birds of Prey” and “Promising Young Woman” — were successful, grossing a combined $275 million worldwide and winning two Oscars out of six nominations. “Barbie” made five times that and recently earned nine Golden Globe nominations and a record-setting 18 Critics Choice nods, on top of special prizes at the Gotham Awards and slots on the National Board of Review and AFI lists of the year’s best films.
PHOTO CREDIT: Victoria Stevens for Variety
“God, if every year could be like this one!” Robbie exclaims as we sit down, her Australian accent punctuated with a hint of wistfulness.
Beyond the broken records and the accolades, Robbie, Ackerley and McNamara see 2023 as a shining example of everything they hoped to achieve with the company, which was founded in their London flat in 2014. Robbie and Ackerley, who are married, met on the set of “Suite Française,” an independent feature on which Ackerley and McNamara (both Brits) were working as assistant directors. Robbie was an Aussie soap star with big-screen aspirations. The trio bonded over their desire to tell female-driven stories.
How do you plan to build on the success of “Barbie” and “Saltburn”?
TOM ACKERLEY: What we set out to do in the beginning is working. We’ve built this company around filmmakers, and we want them to take big swings and be really bold and tell original stories. We’re happy to take the big swings and miss; we’d rather that than play it safe.
MARGOT ROBBIE: Originality is definitely the key. But the thing about being original is you can’t do the thing that worked before. As much as we’re trying to celebrate the moment we’re in right now, our minds immediately go to what’s next. You can’t be original again; you have to be original every time. Whether it’s “I, Tonya” — the tone of that was so completely original — or “Barbie,” they’re all very bold. We swing for the fences, and sometimes you hit it out of the park and it’s amazing. But even if you didn’t hit it out of the park, you can’t not keep taking those big swings.
How do you decide what projects to take on?
MCNAMARA: It’s as important to know what to say no to as it is to say yes to. I don’t think we’re interested in pumping out 100 movies as quick as we can. It’s more, “Who are the people we love working with, and let’s build long-term relationships with them and help support their careers.” Repeat business is key.
ROBBIE: We have to be really clear about why we started the company and what our North Star is always going to be. Because any opportunity is exciting. We set out to break barriers with and for female talent, and if it isn’t a project that could potentially do that, then it’s not a project for us.
ACKERLEY: We obviously have people we would die to work with, but we’re as excited about breaking new talent as we are working with the best of the best filmmakers, like the Gretas and the Emeralds of the world. We want to look back in 10 years’ time and be proud that we fostered and broke a generation of filmmakers.
IN THIS PHOTO: Olivia Wilde/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
LuckyChap has announced that it will be making Olivia Wilde’s next film, “Naughty,” with Universal. The project is on target to begin shooting early this year. What interested you in it?
ROBBIE: We have a penchant for actress-turned-writer-directors, between Olivia, Greta, Emerald and Megan. It’s our sweet spot.
Margot, you’ve mentioned that you want to direct one day. What’s the timeline on that?
ROBBIE: I don’t know. The tricky thing is, as much as I say I’m strict about saying no as a producer, I also get so excited with all the things that I could produce that it ends up taking up all my time. And as an actor, I get to work with so many brilliant directors and watch them do it — it’s like having a front-row seat to the best master class in the world. So it’s really tempting to keep doing that. But directing is a dear ambition of mine”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Cass Bird for WSJ. Magazine
I want to go back to November 2022 and an article from The Wall Street Journal. Looking back a year and seeing how LuckyChap Entertainment have grown since. Even in 2022, Margot Robbie was being heralded as a force for change in Hollywood. Someone very much putting female voices first:
“The company’s current slate of projects widely varies in content and tenor. What the company looks for, according to its principals: material that is left of center. Fresh. Experimental. Yet commercial, they are quick to clarify. Of the projects pitched to them, only “1 percent are the ‘f— yeses,’ ” says Robbie. LuckyChap co-founder and co-principal Josey McNamara adds, “I wouldn’t say [the rest] are ‘hell nos’—a lot of times…it’s not right for us.”
Robbie says that the #MeToo movement has brought even more momentum to the company’s longstanding mission: “The knock-on effect of that was that a slipstream was created for female creatives. I can see quite a few of us riding that slipstream, and I would encourage all female creatives to ride in it.”
Among the talent fostered by the LuckyChap team: filmmaker and writer Emerald Fennell, whose 2020 film Promising Young Woman won her an Oscar, a BAFTA award and a WGA Award, all for best original screenplay. Fennell has become something of an in-house director and proof of concept for LuckyChap, which is also producing her second film, Saltburn, currently in post-production. Fennell says that the company has nurtured and defended her work.
PHOTO CREDIT: Cass Bird for WSJ. Magazine
“They’re not pandering to Hollywood or anyone else,” she says. “They stand behind you and don’t care if it gets them into trouble.” From the beginning of her working relationship with LuckyChap, “They never made me feel like a little girl. They believed in me and helped me,” Fennell says. “I felt safe with them.” And in Hollywood, she says, “it’s no small thing.”
Writer and director Greta Gerwig—who co-wrote and is directing the upcoming LuckyChap project Barbie—also describes Robbie and LuckyChap as champions of the female talent with whom they work. “Once they back a project, they back it all the way,” she says. As both an actor and producer, “Margot has a flash of certainty and then runs at it,” Gerwig says. “She doesn’t have a waffling aspect to her psyche.”
Robbie and her colleagues are part of a wave of film and TV leaders helping women commandeer top creative roles and tell women’s stories on-screen. Actor and director Eva Longoria founded UnbeliEVAble Entertainment, dedicated to telling scripted and unscripted Latino stories. Writer and director Ava DuVernay founded Array, a collective that produces content that aims to “tell inclusive and entertaining stories that will…[amplify] people of color and women of all kinds across all narrative formats.” Hello Sunshine—a media company created by producer and Oscar-winning actor Reese Witherspoon—“puts women at the center of every story we create, celebrate and discover.” (Witherspoon sold the company in 2021 for a reported $900 million to a new company backed by private equity firm
PHOTO CREDIT: Cass Bird for WSJ. Magazine
It’s an increasingly crowded playing field. While sometimes LuckyChap must compete for projects with other companies with similar mandates, “it doesn’t feel like unhealthy competition,” says Robbie. “I’d be thrilled for even more female-led and female-driven companies to start. The more the merrier.”
“They’re not pandering to Hollywood or anyone else,” Emerald Fennell says of Robbie and the LuckyChap Entertainment co-founders. “They stand behind you and don’t care if it gets them into trouble.” Jacquemus shirt and tie, $755, Jacquemus.com.
In the earliest years in the film industry, women regularly worked as directors and producers. In the early 20th century, director Alice Guy Blaché ran her own studio, Solax, and produced up to three films a week; Dorothy Arzner directed nearly 20 films between 1927 and 1943. However, once motion pictures showed signs of becoming lucrative as mass entertainment, Wall Street took notice; the studio system emerged and quickly locked down the industry. Female directors and producers were largely exiled.
“Hollywood was an open space at the time and a new industry,” says Stacy Smith, associate professor of communication at the University of Southern California and founder of the school’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. “[But] when money comes in, marginalized communities are pushed out…. That’s a common theme that runs all the way to present day.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Cass Bird for WSJ. Magazine
Over the decades, as the industry changed, some determined actresses founded companies or acted as producers in an attempt to assert control over their careers. Actor Mary Pickford founded her own production company in 1916 to create better projects and collaborations for herself and helped found United Artists in 1919 in part to distribute her films. After being designated “box office poison” in 1938, Katharine Hepburn managed to option rights to Philadelphia Story and use it as a vehicle for a comeback on her own terms. The movie earned her a best actress Oscar nomination; Robbie cites it as one of her favorite films.
“It’s easy to put female names on a list,” Robbie says of getting female-driven films made. “It’s a bigger hurdle to get someone to bankroll [a] project. We still have a long way to go in that regard; that ship is going to take so much longer to course-correct.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Cass Bird for WSJ. Magazine
While galvanizing, these triumphs and others that followed also belie the historical fight for gender equity in the industry. Only five women have won an Academy Award for an original screenplay since 1956, when the Academy established its current configuration of writing categories; just three women have won best director, out of eight total nominations. (Jane Campion has been nominated twice.) Even with the current proliferation of companies dedicated to nurturing female talent, Smith warns that statistics show that inequality remains tenacious.
Today studios and production companies are considering more female directors and writers, says Robbie. “[But] it’s easy to put female names on a list,” she says. “It’s a bigger hurdle to get someone to bankroll [a] project. We still have a long way to go in that regard; that ship is going to take so much longer to course-correct”.
I think there is something genuinely wonderful and innovative about LuckyChap Entertainment. Their ethos, passion and drive is inspiring! The projects they take on and how they are supporting incredible women and also bringing these captivating stories to life. The future is hugely busy and exciting for them. I know that Margot Robbie especially, as actor and producer, will have a hectic year ahead – and I hope she gets to appear in a film where she uses her natural Australian accent -; maybe awards will come her way and there will be new honours. Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley, Josey McNamara and Sophia Kerr have created this modern-day empire that, unlike a more faceless company or studio, seems to have a very personal and down-to-earth touch. From the vibe and stunning new offices to the impressive and successful filmography behind them right now, I think that the next few years will see LuckyChap Entertainment grow even bigger. Bringing through incredible upcoming female directors and working in T.V. and film. I am excited by the idea of Margot Robbie directing soon. I have said before how she seems like a natural director. So many projects you could see her helming. Whether a biopic (I am begging for someone to make a Blondie biopic!), literary adaptation, Indie film or blockbuster, you know she could make any film a massive success. I want to end with Variety. They write that, despite female filmmakers like Greta Gerwig and Celine Song (Past Lives) making some of 2023’s best films, there is still huge gender disparity throughout film:
“Greta Gerwig‘s “Barbie” wasn’t just the year’s biggest box office winner. It also made history as the highest-grossing movie directed by a woman. Despite the film’s outsized success, major studios gave most of their biggest gigs to male filmmakers.
That’s the conclusion of a new study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. It found that women comprised just 16% of directors on the 250 top-grossing films, which was down from 18% in 2022. There were modest improvements the higher up the list of money-earners you climb — female filmmakers called the shots on 14% of the 100 top films, which was up from 11% in 2022.
IN THIS PHOTO: Celine Song/PHOTO CREDIT: Matthew Dunivan
The findings come as female filmmakers like Gerwig, “Salburn’s” Emerald Fennell, “Past Lives’s” Celine Song and “Priscilla’s” Sofia Coppola released some of the year’s buzziest and most acclaimed movies; and pop divas like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift topped the box office with concert films.
All that critical and commercial success hasn’t changed the employment picture. Indeed, things weren’t much brighter when it came to female talent in other key roles. Overall, women accounted for 22% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers working on the 250 top-grossing films. That was a decline from 24% in 2022. Moreover, 75% of the top-grossing films employed 10 or more men in key behind-the-scenes roles, while just 4% employed 10 or more women.
In descending order women comprised 26% of producers, 24% of executive producers, 21% of editors, 17% of writers, 14% of composers and 7% of cinematographers. Of these roles, women saw gains as composers on the top 250 films, improving by 6%. The number of women employed as producers, executive producers and writers all declined, while the percentage of female editors and cinematographers was roughly even with 2022.
IN THIS PHOTO: Greta Gerwig/PHOTO CREDIT: Ben Rayner via Festival De Cannes
“It’s the ultimate illusion, Greta Gerwig’s well-deserved triumph belies the inequality that pervades the mainstream film industry,” Dr. Martha Lauzen, the report’s author and the center’s founder and executive director, said in a statement. “The numbers tell the story. Behind-the-scenes gender ratios in Hollywood remain dramatically skewed in favor of men.”
The study found that on movies with at least one woman director, more women were hired for key behind-the-scenes roles than films with exclusively male directors. When women were in the directing chair, 61% of writers, 35% of editors, 10% of cinematographers and 26% of composers were female. On films with male directors, women accounted for 9% of writers, 18% of editors, 7% of cinematographers and 11% of composers”.
I wanted to nod to LuckyChap Entertainment before we see whether Barbie and Saltburn are going to scoop Oscar nominations. It is not about the awards and box office. Even so, for Margot Robbie and everyone at LuckyChap Entertainment, starting on modest ground, accolades and financial success is very important. A sign that their vision is coming to life and connecting with people around the world. Despite the fact LuckyChap Entertainment does not exclusively work with female directors, I think that their collaborators with amazing women in film is one of their best aspects. I think it is the dream of every director/screenwriter (me included) to have their script in the hands of LuckyChap Entertainment. There is that blend of a familial vibe and this very determined and ambitious company that are really adding their stamp on the industry. After a very busy and successful 2023, it already looks like this year is going to magnificent for Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley, Sophia Kerr and Josey McNamara’s baby. LuckyChap Entertainment has grow into…
A wonderful and inclusive empire.