Jake Eberts
Birth : 1941-07-10, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Death : 2012-09-06
History
Jake Eberts (July 10, 1941 – September 6, 2012) was a Canadian film producer, executive and financier. He was known for risk-taking and producing a consistently high caliber of movies including such Academy Award-winning titles as Chariots of Fire (1981, uncredited), Gandhi (1982), Dances with Wolves (1990), and the direct-to video Hero of the Rails (1996) and the successful animated feature Chicken Run (2000).
Eberts was born John David Eberts in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the son of Elizabeth (MacDougall), an interior decorator, and Edmond Eberts, who worked for an aluminum manufacturer. Eberts grew up in Montreal and Arvida. He attended Bishop's College School in Lennoxville, Quebec and graduated from McGill University (Bachelor of Chemical Engineering 1962) and Harvard Business School (MBA 1966). Eberts' working career began as a start-up engineer for L'Air Liquide in Spain, Italy, Germany and France. He then spent three years as a Wall Street investor. He moved to London, England in 1971, where he joined Oppenheimer & Co., rising to the position of managing director of the UK brokerage and investment company in 1976.
With no apparent prior interest in film, about 1977 he turned to film financing, and joined David Puttnam in founding Goldcrest Films, an independent film production company, for which he served as president and CEO. His first venture was the animated movie Watership Down.
While with the company in 1979, he made a disastrous personal investment of US$750,000 in Zulu Dawn, which took him almost a decade to recover from. He learned a great deal from this setback, as the output of the company was for the most part exceptional and financially rewarding, with such other films to its credit as The Howling, Chariots of Fire, Local Hero, Gandhi, The Killing Fields and The Dresser. Chariots of Fire and Gandhi won back-to-back Oscars in 1981 and 1982 respectively, and in the period from 1977 to 1983 the company's films received 30 Oscar nominations and won 15. He developed a reputation as an astute and shrewd financier. Rather than seek new talent, he chose to support established directors such as Sir Richard Attenborough, Roland Joffé, Jean-Jacques Annaud, John Boorman, many of whom have worked with him on several pictures.
He resigned from the company in 1984, but returned a year later to attempt to rescue it financially. From its early success of just a few years earlier, when it was seen as a possible saviour of the British film industry, the company had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy by the failure of three high-budget films – Revolution, The Mission and Absolute Beginners, all in 1985-1986.
Eberts continued on until 1987 when he resigned for the last time. The company would continue on under new ownership. Eberts detailed the disaster in his 1990 memoir, My Indecision Is Final: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films (co-authored with Terry Ilott). ...
Source: Article "Jake Eberts" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
In Memory Of
Based on the best-seller book 'The Little Prince', the movie tells the story of a little girl that lives with resignation in a world where efficiency and work are the only dogmas. Everything will change when accidentally she discovers her neighbor that will tell her about the story of the Little Prince that he once met.
Self (archive footage)
A documentary about the making of the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie.
Executive Producer
Mysteries of the Unseen World transports audiences to places on this planet that they have never been before, to see things that are beyond their normal vision, yet literally right in front of their eyes. Mysteries of the Unseen World reveals phenomena that can't be seen with the naked eye, taking audiences into earthly worlds secreted away in different dimensions of time and scale. Viewers experience events that unfold too slowly for human perception
Executive Producer
An ecological drama/documentary, filmed throughout the globe. Part thriller, part meditation on the vanishing wonders of the sub-aquatic world.
Producer
A Brooklyn postal worker follows her Egyptian boyfriend to Cairo where she takes belly-dancing lessons from a legendary but disgraced Egyptian dancer.
Producer
Two tigers are separated as cubs and taken into captivity, only to be reunited years later as enemies by an explorer (Pearce) who inadvertently forces them to fight each other.
Producer
A former gunslinger is forced to take up arms again when he and his cattle crew are threatened by a corrupt lawman.
Self
A documentary of the making of Dances with Wolves told through interviews with cast and crew. It describes the financial and production details, scouting locations, the buffalo hunt, the Lakota Sioux, and the recognition and success the film achieved.
Executive Producer
The film tells the true story of Kurt Gerron, a German-Jewish cabaret and film actor in the 1920s and 1930s who was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp where he was commanded to write and direct a Nazi propaganda film.
Producer
World War I has left golfer Rannulph Junuh a poker-playing alcoholic, his perfect swing gone. Now, however, he needs to get it back to play in a tournament to save the financially ravaged golf course of a long-ago sweetheart. Help arrives in the form of mysterious caddy Bagger Vance.
Executive Producer
The creators of Wallace & Gromit bring you an exciting and original story about a group of chickens determined to fly the coop–even if they can’t fly! It’s hardly poultry in motion when Rocky attempts to teach Ginger and her feathered friends to fly…but, with teamwork, determination and a little bit o’ cluck, the fearless flock plots one last attempt in a spectacular bid for freedom.
Self
Who is Alfred Lepetit? Unknown by the general public but glorified by all the movie industry, Alfred is about to receive a lifetime achievement award for his film career. A portrait of a living legend among stars.
Producer
Archie Grey Owl is a trapper in Canada in the early 1930s when a young Iroquois woman from town asks him to teach her Indian ways. They live in the woods, where she is appalled at how trapped animals die. She adopts two orphaned beaver kits and helps Archie see his way to stop trapping. Instead, he works as a guide, a naturalist writer, and then the Canadian government hires him to save the beaver in a conserve by Lake Ajawaan in Prince Albert National Park. He writes a biography, which brings him attention in Canada and invitations to lecture in England. Before he leaves, he and Anahareo (Pony) marry. In England, his secret is revealed. Will Anahareo continue to love him?
Producer
Little Tree is an 8-year-old Cherokee boy, who, during the time of the depression, loses his parents and starts to live with his Indian grandma and grandpa and learn the wisdom of the Cherokee way of life.
Executive Producer
When the young orphan boy James spills a magic bag of crocodile tongues, he finds himself in possession of a giant peach that flies him away to strange lands.
Executive Producer
In the year 2022, a ruthless prison warden has created the ultimate solution for his most troublesome and violent inmates: Absolom, a secret jungle island where prisoners are abandoned and left to die. But Marine Captain John Robbins, convicted of murdering a commanding officer, is determined to escape the island in order to reveal the truth behind his murderous actions and clear his name.
Producer
Mario and Luigi, plumbers from Brooklyn, find themselves in an alternate universe where evolved dinosaurs live in hi-tech squalor. They're the only hope to save our universe from invasion by the dino dictator, Koopa.
Executive Producer
A River Runs Through It is a cinematographically stunning true story of Norman Maclean. The story follows Norman and his brother Paul through the experiences of life and growing up, and how their love of fly fishing keeps them together despite varying life circumstances in the untamed west of Montana in the 1920s.
Producer
Max Lowe is a Houston surgeon who has grown weary of the bureaucracy of American medicine. When he loses a patient on the operating table, Max impulsively decides to leave America and travel to India in the hope of finding himself. Not long after he arrives in Calcutta, Max is attacked by a group of thugs and left without money or a passport.
Executive Producer
Get Back is a 1991 concert film starring Paul McCartney that documents The Paul McCartney World Tour of 1989–1990. The film was directed by Richard Lester, in a return to his Beatles-related work, and was released by Carolco Pictures and New Line Cinema, through the Seven Arts joint venture.
Executive Producer
Missionary Father LaForgue travels to the New World in hopes of converting Algonquin Indians to Catholicism. Accepted, though warily, by the Indians, LaForgue travels with the Indians using his strict Catholic rules and ideals to try and impose his religion.
Executive Producer
After young Clara receives a wooden nutcracker as a Christmas gift, she dreams about a fantastical battle between her Nutcracker Prince and the evil Mouse King. At stake is the Nutcracker's freedom - and Clara's future happiness.
Executive Producer
Wounded Civil War soldier, John Dunbar tries to commit suicide—and becomes a hero instead. As a reward, he's assigned to his dream post, a remote junction on the Western frontier, and soon makes unlikely friends with the local Sioux tribe.
Co-Executive Producer
The story of an old Jewish widow named Daisy Werthan and her relationship with her black chauffeur, Hoke. From an initial mere work relationship grew in 25 years a strong friendship between the two very different characters in a time when those types of relationships where shunned.
Executive Producer
Director John Boorman drew from his own childhood experiences for this coming-of-age tale about a boy growing up in and around London during World War II. For young Billy, the nightly bombings provide a frightening show, but they include opportunities to rummage through the rubble with friends in the mornings. As Billy plays, his family struggles to remain intact as they suffer through the anguish and losses of wartime.
Executive Producer
14th-century Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and his young novice arrive at a conference to find that several monks have been murdered under mysterious circumstances. To solve the crimes, William must rise up against the Church's authority and fight the shadowy conspiracy of monastery monks using only his intelligence – which is considerable.
Executive Producer
The real-life story of a friendship between two journalists, an American and a Cambodian, during the bloody Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975, which led to the death of 2-3 million Cambodians during the next four years, until Pol Pot's regime was toppled by the intervening Vietnamese in 1979.
Executive Producer
Two dogs, Rowf and Snitter, stuggle to survive in the countryside after escaping from an animal research laboratory. They are pursued by search parties and then the military after rumors spread that they could be carrying the bubonic plague.
Executive Producer
In the future, crime is out of control and New York City's Manhattan is a maximum security prison. Grabbing a bargaining chip right out of the air, convicts bring down the President's plane in bad old Gotham. Gruff Snake Plissken, a one-eyed lone warrior new to prison life, is coerced into bringing the President, and his cargo, out of this land of undesirables.
Executive Producer
In the class-obsessed and religiously divided UK of the early 1920s, two determined young runners train for the 1924 Paris Olympics. Eric Liddell, a devout Christian born to Scottish missionaries in China, sees running as part of his worship of God's glory and refuses to train or compete on the Sabbath. Harold Abrahams overcomes anti-Semitism and class bias, but neglects his beloved sweetheart in his single-minded quest.
Executive Producer
When the warren belonging to a community of rabbits is threatened, a brave group led by Fiver, Bigwig, Blackberry and Hazel leave their homeland in a search of a safe new haven.
