Take Two
Hollywood Story
From investment banking to indie film production
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| Epstein: Closing The Deal. Photo by Robert Holmgren |
Ruth Epstein (MBA ’88) never went to film school, but nine years at Goldman Sachs proved to be great training for her new career in Hollywood.
With fifteen-hour workdays filled with legal and financial negotiations, and the uncertainty of each new venture, investment banking, Epstein has learned, has a lot in common with film producing and screenwriting.
“There is definitely something to be said for having the kind of training I had at Goldman,” says Epstein, who finished production in May on The Deal, a “global oil thriller” she wrote and coproduced.
Set in New York City at a firm loosely based on Goldman Sachs, The Deal tells the story of Tom Grover (Christian Slater), a young investment banker who agrees to manage a Russian oil company deal that promises to alleviate a severe energy crisis gripping the United States. But the deal goes bad, with deadly consequences.
“My aim was to make a story that was not a stereotype,” Epstein explains. “Not everybody on Wall Street is out to do a deal at any price. In the film, there are issues of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. I hope the audience will come away with a better sense about how that world actually operates.”
Presenting an accurate portrayal is very important to Epstein, who knew she wanted to work at Goldman Sachs while still at HBS. “I spent a summer there,” she says. “I loved it from the start. I’m still a Goldie at heart.”
Epstein worked on Wall Street until 1995, when she moved with her husband and young son to California, where she settled into Goldman Sachs’s San Francisco office. When she had her second son in 1996, Epstein needed more time at home, leaving Goldman Sachs a year later. But she didn’t sit idle for long. “I was losing it being at home all day,” she says, attributing her discontent to her type-A personality.
At the urging of a friend, Epstein began to write. She soon came up with the idea for a Wall Street thriller. In HBS fashion, Epstein also started networking. In 2000, she met Harvey Kahn, an independent film producer. He read her script for The Deal and liked it, but observed that it “would need some development work.” The two soon became partners.
Epstein’s inner venture capitalist set to work helping Kahn’s production company, Front Street Productions, to improve its investor portfolio and streamline its funding capabilities. Together, they wrote a business plan to do four independent features and set up a venture capital fund — Front Street Films — to raise the money to finance those productions. “It was the perfect intersection of my interests and my abilities,” says Epstein.
Because The Deal is close to Epstein’s heart, she had a hands-on role in day-to-day production work. As both coproducer and writer, she spent every day on the set in Vancouver, British Columbia, attending to the details that lend authenticity.
The film is expected to premiere at a major film festival this fall and could hit theaters next spring. By then, Epstein may well have finished her next project: writing the screen adaptation of a book about the murders of two Dartmouth College professors in 2001.
“I can’t imagine ever going back to a big firm,” she says. “But I can see myself always doing something with an element of finance in it. Producing films is really business. It’s like, where’s the bottleneck? I can fix that!”
— Margie Kelley
