Maverick Mogul

Old-school movie moguls lunch extravagantly at Morton's, feeding on gossip and opening-weekend grosses. Pitching them an idea can be as complex and time-consuming as making an actual movie. But Mark Cuban is not that kind of mogul.

"When we green-lit Enron, there was no meeting," he says, referring to the documentary about the Houston company's flameout that was released last April. "It was all email. 'Here's the guy, here's his background, here's the budget.' " Elapsed time: 12 minutes. When there's not a lot of red tape, Cuban says, "that is attractive to filmmakers." The movie's entire budget was around $700,000--a sum that wouldn't cover the catering on many movie sets--and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room ended up grossing more than $4 million during its theatrical run.

That's not a lot of cake by Hollywood standards, but Cuban doesn't care about Hollywood standards--his whole MO is to subvert them. In fact, Cuban, with his longtime business partner Todd Wagner, is questioning everything about the century-old movie business, from the way films are made to the way they're distributed, marketed, and experienced. They've built a vertically integrated mini-empire--2929 Entertainment is the umbrella company--that allows them to "control our own destiny," as Cuban puts it, in the same way that movie studios did in the first half of the 20th century.

Their accumulated assets now include production entities HDNet Films and 2929 Productions; Magnolia Pictures, which acquires and distributes indie films such as the Oscar-nominated Capturing the Friedmans; the Landmark Theatres chain of 60 art-house cinemas; and two television channels that broadcast in high-definition and crank out original programming.

Clad in black jeans and a light-blue striped dress shirt, sipping from a can of Red Bull, Cuban doesn't cut a particularly iconoclastic figure. He's actually mild-mannered and rational in person--a far cry from his irascible persona at Dallas Mavericks games (he bought the NBA team in 2000 and has racked up hefty fines, including a record $500,000 for saying a certain ref wasn't fit to "manage a Dairy Queen").

But when it comes to business, the guy's a walking brainstorming session. And, astonishing as it may seem, he and Wagner just may be to cinema's digital age what the Warner brothers became by dragging the industry out of the silent era with The Jazz Singer. Today, as major studios fret about their sagging box-office revenues--and kick and scream about the digital bogeyman at their door--Cuban and Wagner are embracing the beast and embarking on an ambitious series of experiments intended to make better movies, and to make movies a better business. With films forced to compete with everything from TiVo to Xbox to the Internet, they're a study in what it takes to inject entrepreneurial energy into Hollywood.

"If you look around Hollywood and say, Which of these companies are really trying new things and looking at new models, it's an awfully short list," says Peter Broderick, president of Paradigm Consulting and the founder of Next Wave Films. Cuban and Wagner, he says, share "a kind of gleeful quality, and I think Mark in particular loves the idea of being David to the studios' Goliath."

We view innovation and taking chances as part of our business.

"It's not inherent in the industry to be entrepreneurial," Wagner says. "It's a culture of cover your ass: 'As long as I keep getting a big star in my movie, I can't get fired.' We view innovation and taking chances as part of our business. If we don't do it, someone else will, and they'll knock us down."

The cluster of companies Cuban and Wagner have assembled is tiny compared with the media giants behind the major studios--Sony, Viacom, Disney, and NBC Universal, itself owned by GE. (2929 Entertainment and all of its components are privately held.) But the point is not to rival the big studios, it's to actually achieve the synergy others just jabber about--and, naturally, to make a lot of money (these are the guys, after all, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for more than $5 billion).

It's common knowledge that among the things Cuban purchased with the money he made from the sale of Broadcast.com were the Mavericks ($285 million), a 24,000-square-foot mansion in Dallas ($15 million), and a Gulfstream G-V private jet ($41 million).

Less well known is that he also bought a high-definition TV and signed up for DirecTV. "There was one channel, Channel 199, that just looped the same 90 minutes of high-def content," he says. "I just kept watching it all the time. I'm like, either something's wrong with me, or there's an opportunity here."