Anonymous Content’s new CEO Darren Walker said the management and production company is developing a feature film on iconic writer James Baldwin that it will produce with the Obamas’ Higher Ground.
Anonymous Content has closed a deal to option the best-selling biography Baldwin: A Love Story, Walker by Nicholas Boggs as well as a deal for Boggs and his partner, Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James, to write a script. Walker flagged the deal at the Bloomberg Screentime conference in LA Thursday, appearing with Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of Emerson Collective, Anonymous Content’s majority owner.
Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, it tells overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.
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Producers on the film will include Walker and David Levine for Anonymous Content; Anikah McLaren for Higher Ground; and Howard Gertler. Boggs and James will also serve as executive producers.
Walker was tapped as chief executive of Anonymous Content early this year. He was formerly the president of the Ford Foundation, leading its $17 billion endowment.
“Our balance sheet will be increased. Will have an envelope to do [more] … We can, because what happens when you have a long-term investor? You can be courageous if you have conviction and you have an investor who is aligned with that,” he said. The idea is to move away from the “fee-for-hire” production model. “Now Emerson has made it possible for us to become a financier in the market, so we’ll be able to co-finance, finance, take the lead in financing a film. So it won’t be like it has been, where our production team gets a great script and they say we’ve got to go out and find someone to finance this.”
Powell Jobs, also a major investor in The Atlantic, said Anonymous Content founder Steve Golin had “a beautiful vision” but that people grieved and “entropy set in a bit” after he passed away seven years ago, followed by tough times in the industry with Covid, then Hollywood strikes. But the company is attached to several dozen festival films this season, Emmy wins, and, under television and content head Levine, co-produced Zoe Kazan’s upcoming Netflix series East Of Eden as Walker said the independent builds up to “version 3.0”
Powell Jobs, along with former HBO chief Richard Plepler, are joining a reconstituted board under chairman Michael Klein, Walker said. Steve Shikya was named COO in August following the hires of Liza Burnett Fefferman as chief communications and marketing officer and Michael Sinclair as chief legal officer.
Asked about the unconventional choice of Walker to run the company, Powell Jobs said: “People were asking that at the beginning, and within a few months, everyone was saying what a brilliant stroke of genius it was, because he’s electrified Anonymous Content and also created quite buzz across the industry.”