Common roots connect film industry executives

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, October 23, 2005

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News

TORONTO – Tom Bernard, Jesuit High School class of '70, knew there was something to all this movie stuff when his English teacher planned to screen Tom Jones for the public. "The parents committee showed up that night to block the screening," he recalls. "There was a big hoodoo about it.

ADAM ROUNTREE/AP

Sony Pictures Classics co-presidents Tom Bernard (left) and Michael Barker attended different Dallas high schools.

"After about an hour of debate, the film went on under protest. That's when I realized there's a lot going on with these movies. They really affect people."

Michael Barker, Kimball High School class of '72, used to catch weekend matinees at the Texas Theater, best known as the place Lee Harvey Oswald decided to catch a flick on that fateful November afternoon in 1963.

"They used to put a rope over the seat where Oswald sat," says Mr. Barker. "When we showed up for the matinees, they'd take the rope off and we'd all take turns sitting in the seat."

Mr. Bernard and Mr. Barker didn't know each other in their formative Dallas days. They attended different colleges – Mr. Bernard the University of Maryland, Mr. Barker the University of Texas at Austin. But 2006 will mark their 15-year anniversary as co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics, one of the most successful and influential specialty distributors in the world.

"The Texas terrors," says Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, who has known the SPC duo for 20 years. "They're the one unchanging constant. They do their thing, and they haven't varied much since they've started. They've stayed with their core audience of sophisticated art fans, and they really do business outside of the modern technologies available to them."

Which technologies would those be? "Oh, fax machines?" quips Mr. Bowles.

He kids, of course. On this day in the middle of the Toronto International Film Festival, the bulky Mr. Bernard, a high school offensive lineman, and the smaller Mr. Barker are both busy with their Blackberries. ("This thing right here makes it all happen," says Mr. Bernard.)

But the Sony boys do run a stripped-down, hands-on shop, with just 22 staffers, and they tend to tackle most tasks themselves. As Mr. Barker munches on a fruit plate at a hotel restaurant, they glance through a set of print ads for Thumbsucker, which will be released shortly after Toronto.

It's a busy festival for Mr. Bernard and Mr. Barker, who brought seven films to Toronto this year. Besides Thumbsucker, there's the acclaimed biopic Capote, the big Cannes winner L'Enfant, the documentaries Why We Fight and The Devil and Daniel Johnston, the thriller Caché, and Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto. Earlier in the day, Mr. Barker closed a deal to purchase the Brazilian film House of Sand.

That's a big slate for one festival, but just a drop in the bucket for a company that has distributed a long line of important, successful and acclaimed art films. A short list includes Howard's End; Indochine; Crumb; The City of Lost Children; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Talk to Her; The Fog of War; and Winged Migration.

Not a bad résumé for a couple of Texas transplants who remember a different kind of Dallas.

"My first taste of Texas was when I went downtown during Texas-OU weekend," says Mr. Bernard, who moved from New Jersey with his family. "I was a freshman. I saw a priest from my high school drunk in the gutter. I almost got beat up three or four times, because I didn't know if I was supposed to say I was for Texas or OU. I went into Jack Ruby's strip club.

"I realized I wasn't in the North anymore. It was cool."

Mr. Barker now owns land in Bandera, about 60 miles north of San Antonio; his stepmother lives in Hunt. Like most of the film industry that isn't in Los Angeles, the Sony guys work out of New York.

While Mr. Bernard played football for Jesuit, Mr. Barker, who was born on a U.S Army base in Germany and lived in Nuremberg before moving to Dallas, flexed his muscles on the Kimball debate team. Mr. Barker ran a film series at UT; Mr. Bernard did the same at Maryland.

They met after college at Films Incorporated, which specialized in nontheatrical distribution in the pre-video days. From there it was on to theatrical distribution for UA Classics, and then Orion Classics.

They started Sony Pictures Classics with Marcie Bloom in 1992. Ms. Bloom has taken a back seat since she suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm in 1996. "She's our professor emeritus," says Mr. Barker.

They made their name at SPC with their very first film, Howard's End, which grossed $25 million on a $5 million budget and ended up with three Oscars.

The film's success popularized a pair of trends now taken for granted in specialty distribution. Its staggered release schedule – opening in a few big markets before gradually building word-of-mouth and expanding across the country – is now standard practice for smaller films.

On a larger scale, SPC's success convinced other major studios that boutique divisions weren't such a bad idea. And so the likes of Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics were created to handle small and midsize films for big companies.

But SPC is best known for its relationships with filmmakers. "We established ourselves as an auteur-driven company from day one," says Mr. Barker.

Their first big score was persuading the late François Truffaut to let UA Classics handle U.S. distribution for The Last Metro back in 1980. Since then, they've built steady relationships with Pedro Almodóvar, John Sayles and Zhang Yimou, among others.

"Tom and I have a real knowledge of film, and it's a personal knowledge of film from when we were really young," says Mr. Barker. "I know it's an intangible and it sounds self-serving, but I think it's one of the reasons these filmmakers really take to us. They know we understand what films worked in the past and why. We log it in our brains, and we have such a long background in film."

These qualities impressed Bennett Miller, the director of Capote, which opened in Dallas Friday.

"It's been great," he said in Toronto. "Those guys just speak my language. They're so blunt and real. They've got taste and instincts and guts and audacity and ambition and a sense of fun. I couldn't be more pleased right now."

And sometimes, those instincts take Mr. Bernard and Mr. Barker back to the Lone Star State.

They were drawn to Tommy Lee Jones' new border tale The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada largely because of its Texas authenticity. Ditto for films as disparate as John Sayles' Lone Star and Richard Linklater's Slacker.

"Some of our decisions are definitely influenced by our background in Texas," says Mr. Barker. "When we saw Lone Star, we thought, 'That's really authentic stuff,' and that's one of the reasons we wanted to distribute that movie. With Slacker, the movie is such an Austin movie, and Richard Linklater is such an Austin character. We put up the finishing money and released the film. Things like that influence us and probably come from those roots we have."

Those roots have since spread far and wide. But they were planted in Dallas long ago, back when a couple of teenagers came South for high school.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com