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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Through a music connection, McG had met Drew Barrymore -- who owned the rights to Charlie's Angels -- and the two clicked. She took McG to Columbia's Amy Pascal for a meeting, where Pascal was typically blunt: "I said, 'Drew, he's never made a movie, you're insane! There's no way I'm putting him in charge of a $100 million film.'"

Barrymore just put her arm around McG and said, "He directs or we don't do it." McG then proceeded to climb on the table and perform the entire movie from a stack of 5-by-7 cards.

"He even did the dance numbers," says Leonard Goldberg, the former head of 20th Century Fox and the producer of the original TV series, who was also at the meeting. "People may not know this, but he could have a second career as a dancer. He's remarkably likable and has an enormous amount of positive energy."

At some point in the pitch, Pascal's arms slowly unfolded. "Sometimes you just know. I just had a feeling that he was the right guy," she says from her office in Culver City, California. "He wowed me, and he's wowed me ever since."

Goldberg and Pascal were prudent enough to provide McG with plenty of adult supervision and not just set him free with a suitcase full of cash. "We surrounded him with veteran people," says Goldberg, who is coproducing Limelight with McG. They also kept a tight rein on the schedule. "We tried in every way to support him. But I'm a firm believer that once the movie starts shooting, it's in the hands of the director."

Charlie's Angels had the biggest opening weekend ever for a first-time director ($40 million) and went on to earn $264 million at the box office. His sequel in 2003, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, grossed $259 million, and together the two films solidified McG's reputation in Hollywood as a bankable director who can appeal to the magic four quadrants (young and old, male and female). "He's the kind of guy where if you put a big franchise in his hands, you know you're going to be taken care of and have a big hit movie," says Pascal, who now runs Sony Pictures. "He's like Spielberg. Steven doesn't go over budget. In the old days, guys who made big movies, that is what they did. They paid attention to the budget. It seems to be a lost responsibility."

As afflictions go, it would be hard to find one better suited for a media mogul -- or any mogul for that matter -- than a seemingly endless capacity for control. To call McG a control freak might be uncharitable. Let's just say he's extremely attentive to detail.

Yet now, with his shrink-implanted coping skills, McG is able to control his need for control. His mental chiropractic adjustment was a transformative event. At the most immediate level, it gives him tremendous focus and patience for the material and people he's working with. During a screening on the Warner lot with his special-effects supervisor and Industrial Light & Magic team, I watch McG use a laser pointer to indicate areas on a particular robot where the patina is too shiny. To create a look for the sophisticated avionics used in Terminator's aircraft, he had the Gulfstream Web site brought up so his people could devise the appropriate futuristic upgrade. To capture the stunning aesthetic of the movie, he had a special film stock created with triple the standard silver content. In casting the movie, McG took pains to create a polyglot crew, hiring the rapper Common and the pneumatic, multi-ethnic Moon Bloodgood. ("In a man-against-machine future," he says, "I don't care if you're black or white, straight or gay, a man or a woman. It's all ability-based.") For background reading, Mr. Pop Rocks and Coke gave the cast copies of Cormac McCarthy's grim postapocalyptic novel, The Road.

Very little escapes McG's attention. At one point while watching footage, I ask how often Bale had to have his buzz cut redone to maintain continuity. Without looking up or even thinking, he responds, "Every three days."

In other words, if McG were a control freak, this world would be his paradise. Dozens of properties in development across every media platform. Tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in play at any given time. Hundreds of cast and crew to be fed, watered, and directed. Dozens of components to each production, every one of them an endless hair ball of decisions, problems, creative choices.

"A big movie shoot like Terminator costs $350,000 a day, so you have to manage the work hours," he says. "Grips, gaffers, DPs, craft services, actors, stunt coordinators, technical consultants, outside producers -- the list goes on and on. So you're in Albuquerque, New Mexico, waking up at 3:30 in the morning, working until midnight, on mountaintops, in snow, underwater, you name it. It's a war and it is not glamorous and you get ear infections because so much dirt gets in your ears. It is very, very physical and ..." he pauses, remembering his time in the desert, "wonderful."