Steve Golin, the Oscar-winning producer who was founder and CEO of Anonymous Content, has died of cancer. He was 64.
I have met Steve several times and he always struck me as both a great cinephile and cineaste, in addition to being a savvy businessman. He truly loved cinema.
Golin was a pioneer in blending the business of talent management with production. Anonymous Content, which Golin founded in 1999, worked with major artists such as Soderbergh, Emma Stone, Edgar Wright, Ryan Gosling, Alfonso Cuaron, and Cary Fukunaga to shepherd such movies and TV series as “Spotlight,” “The Revenant,” “13 Reasons Why,” HBO’s “True Detective” and “The Knick” and USA’s “Mr. Robot.”
He was an executive producer on the upcoming series “Catch-22.”
Anonymous emerged at a time in which there was intense demand for high quality content. Dubbed the “peak TV” era, it corresponded with a willingness by media companies to back attention-grabbing shows and limited series that took creative risks.
He explained his strategy in the following way: “We would much rather find a piece of material, hire the writer, develop it and package it the way we like it, and figure out what broadcaster out there likes what we have developed.”
Prior to founding Anonymous Content, Golin created Propaganda Films, a talent management, advertising and production company that helped launch the careers of Spike Jonze and Michael Bay. He sold Propaganda to Polygram and exited the company when Polygram was in turn sold to Seagram in 1998.
Golin earned Oscar nominations for producing Babel and The Revenant, and won the Best Picture Oscar for Spotlight.
At Propaganda, he shepherded creatively daring projects such as “Being John Malkovich,” “Lost Highway” and “Kill Me Again,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and “Boy Erased.”
Golin said he had learned to be sanguine about the fates of the projects that he helped bring to the wider public. “You’re going to have your successes and failures, and to try to realize that it’s all about doing what you believe in and hard work, and when a movie’s not a success you kind of just have to dust yourself off, get up and go again, because there’s no logic to it. Nobody sets out to make a bad movie or bad TV show. We all set out to do great work.”
