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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Social Network Producer Mike De Luca

February 16, 2011 by Scott Timberg

From the outside, The Astaire Building, the early-‘90s structure on the Sony lot where Michael De Luca Productions is housed, is about as rock ‘n’ roll as the dancer which lends the edifice its name.

But De Luca’s office – which includes the usual neat stacks of scripts on the desk, scattering of books, and LCD television – shows that something a little more personal is at work here.

          

The mod rug that evokes the work of Charles and Ray Eames, crisp Mad Men-style couch and framed black and white photographs – selections from California pop artist Ed Ruscha’s photo-doc of the mid-‘60s Sunset Strip – suggests that this guy has style. And maybe some taste, too, for classic modernism’s austere intellectualism and sharp edges.

“I like those clean lines,” says De Luca, who once lived in a sleek modernist house above Sunset Plaza when he was the bad-boy production head of New Line. “My wife doesn’t, though, so we’re living in a Cape Cod-style house in Brentwood right now. This is an homage,” he says with a little smile, neither boastful nor embarrassed, “to the bachelor pad I had to give up.”
A lot has changed for De Luca — and the industry — since indie’s heyday, when he developed American History X, Menace 2 Society and Boogie Nights – and helped convince the ambitious little studio to put aside unprecedented sums for The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Or has it? Industry buzz has De Luca, now 45 and father of a 2-year-old girl, on the verge of a comeback, or the early stages of roll of great movies. The Social Network — directed by David Fincher, whom De Luca helped break with Seven – has become the most talked about film of last year, showing off a half dozen great performances and one of the most admired scripts in memory. 



Here is my Hollywood Reporter Q+A with De Luca, who talks about past, present and future.

Filed Under: 90s, film, indie, west coast

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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