Glen Hartford

World Screen Weekly, November 1, 2007

Chairman and CEO

Cinamour Entertainment

Glen Hartford grew up in the entertainment industry, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say he has show biz in his blood. His father was a feature-film director, writer and producer, and his mother was a contract actress at Universal.

“My dad put me in movies as an actor when I was a kid, and I really enjoyed it,” says Hartford, who starred in The Toxic Horror with John Carradine and in Hell Squad. “He also had a distribution business with Cannon Films, and when I was 18, I helped him build up that company, so I learned about distribution. Then I got into producing, and in 2000 I set up my own company, Cinamour Entertainment.”

From his work with his father, Hartford learned the value of combining production and distribution. “What helps us is that we can offer in-house productions as well as programming that we acquire from [third parties],” he says. “And as we started off as producers, we try to position ourselves as a very honest distributor—a producer’s distributor.”

Hartford explains that another key to Cinamour’s success as an independent film company has been maintaining a wide variety of programming: documentaries, specials, reality series and feature films.

“Jury Duty is a very high-profile celebrity reality series of 130 half-hour episodes that has been syndicated in 85 percent of the U.S., and we are getting a lot of requests for that,” explains Hartford. The series combines real-life small-claims-court cases with a three-person jury of celebrities who cross-examine the litigants in order to reach a verdict.

“We are developing a lot of TV series, including a wrestling show called Behind the Curtain,” says Hartford. “Our next feature film is a thriller called Red Water, and currently, our big movie is From Mexico With Love, which is coming out theatrically.” Hartford wrote the screenplay for this film, which is about a migrant worker who moonlights as a boxer. The movie is directed by Jimmy Nickerson, who was the fight coordinator for several boxing movies, including Rocky and Raging Bull.

From his father, Hartford says, he learned how to be forward thinking. Cinamour is always looking at what opportunities technology provides, including video on demand. “There are a lot of companies that are looking forward to the days when people will sit in their house in the middle of nowhere and buy movies for 99 cents. When you’ve got six million people doing that, it’s worth a lot.”

Asked what he likes most about his work, Hartford replies, “I enjoy making a movie, like From Mexico With Love, and after the movie is over, people come up with tears in their eyes and say, ‘Thank you for showing something that is so important.’ It’s the reaction of the people who see my programming that makes me happy—it’s like medicine, you know?”

—By Anna Carugati