Glen Hartford

World Screen Weekly, December 18, 2008

Chairman & CEO

Cinamour Entertainment

The son of an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and a Universal contract actress, Glen Hartford quips that he was born into the entertainment business, "with no way out." While he contemplated becoming a lawyer, it was a love of creativity that kept Hartford in the production side of the entertainment industry. After running a post-production house for a number of years, Hartford set up Cinamour Entertainment in 2000 and soon set about writing and producing feature films. One of his creations, Forbidden Warrior, was recently scooped up by Showtime, and another, From Mexico with Love, has a theatrical deal in place with Village Roadshow. The agreement will see the production, about an up-and-coming boxer, rolling out on 300 screens across the U.S.

Theatrical, however, is not a huge piece of the Cinamour pie, as Hartford explains. "Nowadays, it’s so hard for even the studios to get an opportunity to put things out theatrically—the marketplace is so crowded. We’re focusing on DVD, VOD and TV."

The VOD piece, in particular, is growing, Hartford notes, and Cinamour is looking to keep the pipelines filled with an output of at least five features a year. "Our goal is to get as many feature films produced as we can, specifically genre films." While conceding that the credit crisis has made financing films a challenging process, Hartford notes that producers can still be successful, as long as they keep their funding sources diversified. "You’ve got to [have] some private money, some presales, some institutional financing."

It’s a methodology that has worked for Cinamour, which has several new productions to tout this year, among them The Mrs. Clause with Lea Thompson, and the coming of age film Mo. On the thriller front, meanwhile, Cinamour is showcasing Recoil, starring Tom Berenger and Luke Perry. In addition to rolling out the film, which will be released by Twentieth Century Fox on DVD in the U.S., Cinamour is developing a related video game via its newly established gaming business. The Recoil video game will hit shelves at around the same time as the DVD is released, Hartford notes.

Another area that Hartford is ramping up is television, following the company’s previous success with the syndicated reality show Cheaters and Guru 2 Go for Discovery’s FitTV, among other unscripted offerings. The latest is America’s Hardest Bounty Hunters on Fox Reality. "We would like to do much more TV."

Whatever the medium, Hartford relishes taking a hands-on approach with Cinamour’s output. "I love being creative," he says. That, however, hasn’t closed the company off from taking on third-party fare. "We are actively looking for titles," he says. "They are just not that easy to find. If they’re great then the majors have them, and if they’re not great you don’t want them!"

—By Mansha Daswani