Hollywood's Rogue Mogul: How Terminator Director McG Is Blowing Up the Movie Business

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The Germinator: McG is using his ever-expanding financial leverage to explore new ways to make -- and own -- his work. | Photo by Jill Greenberg

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The Antihero: The new Terminator's gritty aesthetic seems to set it on a new artistic plane. "In this world," says McG, "Everything's ability-based." | Photo by Jill Greenberg

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The advance buzz on the film has been impressive. Even the crucial message-board geeks seem lathered up by McG's grimy, primal futurescape. In fact, he seems to have produced a work that will force Hollywood to look at him differently. McG has never been all pinkies up about his art. He embraces mass culture and all the gaudy, T&A-filled crashing and burning that implies. And he has long been seen as a sort of bubblegum auteur (one critic of his first film, Charlie's Angels, called it a "Pop Rocks and Coke" kind of movie), a world away from the Scorseses, Finchers, and Coen brothers. Yet in the past few years, McG has stealthily emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood.

To put it in raw numerical terms, he's now too big to be ignored. The man was paid $350,000 for 2000's Charlie's Angels, which together with its sequel grossed more than $500 million worldwide. But he earned $6 million for Terminator Salvation and just locked in $10 million for the second film in what will be a new Terminator trilogy -- likely a billion-plus-dollar reboot of the 1980s Schwarzenegger titles. In January, Disney announced McG will direct 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo, a prequel to the 1954 film; his fee: $8 million against 7% of the gross.

But big-money movies are only a slice of the McG empire. His production company, Wonderland Sound and Vision, has shows and pilots on every major TV network and beyond. After four seasons and more than 1 million albums sold, The O.C. is in syndication. His Pussycat Dolls Present series, created with über-producer Jimmy Iovine, had a two-season run promoting two international pop acts that sold 6 million records. The paranormal thriller Supernatural was just picked up for a fifth season on the CW (it's also in syndication), and last year, NBC added a second season of the spy-gadget-action-nerd comedy Chuck. Wonderland also sold three pilots this season: ABC picked up Limelight (a contemporary version of Fame that's based on the high-school experience of Grammy-winning producer Pharrell Williams); CBS took the obstacle-course-car-rally reality show Road Rage; and Fox bought Human Target, based on the DC comic book of the same name. For the extra-small screen, Wonderland co-produced 40 Webisodes of Sorority Forever (underwritten by H&M) and recently created the thriller Exposed for the newly relaunched WB.com, where McG is also an executive producer.

None of which is likely to get McG inducted into the Academy. But on the back of a P.J. Clarke's napkin, he jots down the revenue produced by all the components of his business. It easily exceeds $2 billion. That's a lot of influence. And now, with the new Terminator on its way, McG is looking to apply that influence in a whole new way: by turning the tables on the studios themselves.

McG never did get on that plane, but the reason he couldn't wasn't quite as simple as the one fed to the media at the time. "It was easier to say it was a fear of flying because, while it might make me look weak, people can understand it and I don't have to say, 'Well, I'm kind of crazy,' " McG says, sitting in a private dining room at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. "In reality, it was a control issue: Whenever I got outside my comfort zone, I just felt like I was going to die."

In Hollywood, where alcohol, drug, and sex addictions are copped to without apology, McG's agoraphobia wouldn't elicit much sympathy. But it has intruded repeatedly on his life. "I was supposed to go to USC, but I spent one night in the dorm and just freaked out," he says. He ended up attending UC Irvine, 10 minutes away from home, studying psychology. McG produced and cowrote a number of the band Sugar Ray's hits back in the mid-'90s: "I was 22 when Sugar Ray got signed and were touring, but I couldn't get beyond a 35-mile comfort zone, so the rock-star dream of groupies and reckless abandon? Didn't happen. After Charlie's Angels, I got an invitation from Prince Charles to attend an event at Buckingham Palace. Couldn't go."

Then at the airport in Burbank, everything came to a head.

"It put me under a lot of duress with the Warner people," says McG, in a skinny tie covered in Bugs Bunny skulls, a salute for a later meeting with Warner. "Ari Emanuel, one of my agents, came over to my house when I got the lawsuit letter from Warner." Here he adopts a corporate lawyer tone: "'We are reserving all our rights ...' because they spent a lot of money on preproduction."