Roy Lee

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For the baseball player, see Roy Lee.

Roy Lee (born in Brooklyn, New York, USA on March 23, 1969) is a Korean-American film producer who regularly takes well known Asian films and remakes them for American audiences. Examples include The Ring, The Grudge and The Departed. Lee co-owns his production company, Vertigo Entertainment, in Beverly Hills, California with his partner Doug Davison.

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[edit] Biography

Roy Lee was born in 1969 at Wyckoff Heights Hospital, in Brooklyn. His father, a doctor, and his mother, a devout Christian, had been in America for just three years and were still trying to fit in. Lee’s mother nurtured hopes that he would become a minister. [1]

As an undergraduate at George Washington University, Lee did an internship at the Washington bureau of the law firm Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson. He began a self-improvement program in which he read a book a day, working his way through the best-seller list, from Douglas Adams to Stephen King. After graduating George Washington University, Lee attended law school at American University where he prepared for a career in corporate law.

[edit] Career

In 1996, after graduating law school at American University and working at Fried Frank for eight months, he moved to Los Angeles and soon got a job as a “tracker” at a production company called Alphaville. Trackers monitor all the spec material being submitted around Hollywood--what's good, what's bad, what's being sent where, and when, what's selling, for how much money. At the time, trackers shared information over the phone, constantly updating each other all day in an endless cycle of calls. Lee had a brainstorm: why not put the whole system online, as Fried Frank had done internally with its caseload server. In 1997, Lee set up an Internet bulletin board called Tracker for twenty of his friends, who logged and rated the scripts they read, and posted all the pertinent tracker information for each.

Within six months, Lee had established twenty-five online groups for other trackers at production companies and studios all over Hollywood. Since he was the only member who belonged to every group, he had the best information. Lee’s idea changed the spec script market forever. While spec scripts and pitches continued to sell, weaker material would be dismissed more quickly, often within a single day, to the frustration of many agents. Tracking material online brought more velocity to the market, but it also brought more honesty, it allowed development execs to sift for material more effectively, and it put more pressure on agents and producers to represent better material. [2]

In 1999, Lee went to work for BenderSpink, a talent-management company owned by two of his friends, Chris Bender and JC Spink. He was charged with finding Internet content: short films that would play on personal computers. [3] Lee also created with Ed Kashiba, Scriptshark, an online method for novice screenwriters to have their scripts assessed and potentially sold to major film studios. Later, Lee sold this site to iFilm which later sold it to and is currently owned by The New York Times.

[edit] Vertigo Entertainment

After setting up numerous film projects at all the major studios, he left BenderSpink, in the fall of 2001 and joined with Doug Davison to create Vertigo Entertainment. Davison would do the follow-up work on a project after Lee had done the selling. In the beginning, Lee admits that the hardest thing was making contacts abroad. [4]

Lee later became market attuned. His pitch was simple and effective: he would explain to Asian distributors that their films would probably never sell in America, because Americans hate movies with subtitles, and that they would make more money by selling the remake rights anyway. Then Lee would assure the rights holder that his agenda would never get muddled with theirs because he was going to represent them for free (with the American studio paying his fee if the film was made). Once Lee had secured the right to negotiate for an Asian company, he would tell the studios to regard the film as a script that someone had taken the trouble to film, and that happened to have been tested and proved as a hit in its home country. [5]

Lee earned his first motion picture producing credit on Gore Verbinski’s 2002 blockbuster The Ring. He went on to produce the 2004 haunted house horror film The Grudge, which starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and was based on the 2000 Japanese thriller, Ju-On, directed by Takashi Shimizu. The box office hit currently holds the record for the biggest horror opening weekend of all time following its October 2004 release.

The Grudge 2 was released in October 2006, starring Amber Tamblyn and Sarah Michelle Gellar, and directed by Takashi Shimizu, which topped the box office at $22 million in its opening weekend. Also in October 2004, The Departed, a crime thriller from Warner Bros., directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson was released, grossing $27 million in its opening weekend. It was Scorsese’s biggest opening ever. The Departed later went on to win Best Picture at the 79th Academy Awards.

Currently, Lee is in various stages of development and production on a number of projects, including The Strangers (a suspense thriller starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman), Quarantined (a horror thriller starring Jennifer Carpenter, Jay Hernandez and Columbus Short and directed by John Dowdle), A Tale of Two Sisters (a horror thriller), Shutter, and a remake of the paranormal thriller The Eye (staring Jessica Alba).

[edit] Filmography

[edit] References

  1. ^ Letter from California: Remake Man: The New Yorker
  2. ^ Letter from California: Remake Man: The New Yorker
  3. ^ Letter from California: Remake Man: The New Yorker
  4. ^ Letter from California: Remake Man: The New Yorker
  5. ^ Letter from California: Remake Man: The New Yorker

[edit] External links

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