🎧 Tales From the ’90s: New Line's Decade of Domination
Mike De Luca and Richard Brener on the indie studio's bold bets from 'Austin Powers' to 'Se7en': 'Sleeper hits by necessity'
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This is the fifth and final installment (for now) in Richard Rushfield’s Hollywood Stories series about the ’90s. Earlier podcasts feature Ain’t It Cool News alum Drew McWeeny, CAA founder and longtime Universal exec Ron Meyer, Last Action Hero writers Adam Leff and Zak Penn and Winnie Holzman, the creator of My-So Called Life, the seminal TV show that preceded her work on Wicked.
The 1990s was an era of explosive creativity and innovation in the entertainment industry, and New Line Cinema was the movie studio of that golden moment. Richard Rushfield unpacks the mindset behind the magic with two execs who got their start then and there: Mike De Luca is today the co-chair and CEO of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, but in the 1990s he was the head of production at New Line, a powerful role he stepped into at the tender age of 27. Richard Brener started as a temp at New Line in 1995 and never left, working his way up to run the studio (now a division of Warner Bros.) as its president and chief creative officer.
Together, in conversation on the Warners lot, they recall how the upstart label launched by Bob Shaye in 1967 struck box office and creative gold nearly 30 years later with comedy blockbusters (Austin Powers, Dumb and Dumber, Rush Hour, The Wedding Singer) and revered auteur-driven dramas (American History X, Boogie Nights, Se7en). As an indie, “you were kind of locked into lower-budget acquisitions and films — like what you were able to do had to be things with new talent and new voices and also things that people weren’t getting from the major studios, so that all kind of coalesced into a business plan of sleeper hits by necessity,” De Luca says. “We were not afraid of trying things that we liked, even if other people had passed on them.”
