On an Old West Set, Trying to Create Hollywood’s Future

Dec. 18, 2019 By Brooks Barnes

Rideback Ranch is an attempt by one of the entertainment industry’s leading producers to find a new way to develop ideas for movies and TV shows.

A gnarled buffalo hide hangs inside “the barn,” a cavernous room furnished with sofas and long tables. A secret passageway leads to an old-fashioned saloon where whiskey bottles line the wooden shelves and the bar stools are actual saddles. Antlers and antique rifles adorn the walls.

A cowboy maxim greets visitors: “Everybody in. Everybody forward. Everybody up.”

This is Rideback Ranch and, in some ways, it feels like a movie set, perhaps one built for Leonardo DiCaprio’s Old West scenes in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” But the two-year-old complex in a gentrifying area of Los Angeles called Filipinotown is actually an attempt by one of the entertainment industry’s leading producers, Dan Lin, to find a new way to develop ideas for movies and TV shows.

Rideback is a communal work space for Hollywood writers and producers. Mr. Lin calls it “a new kind of production hub — a community in service of creativity.”

His credits include blockbusters like “Aladdin,” “It” and “The Lego Movie.” He was the producing force behind “The Two Popes,” a $40 million comedic drama about Vatican succession that arrives on Netflix on Friday. “The Two Popes,” nominated for four Golden Globes, including one for best drama, is expected to be a major contender at the Academy Awards.

But how does Mr. Lin keep the hits coming?

The challenges include labor unrest; screenwriters fired their agents en masse in April and the major agencies and the Writers Guild of America are fighting each other in court. The streaming boom has created a glut of content (495 scripted original series in 2018, an 85 percent increase from 2011), increasing the pressure to come up with concepts that can break through. Film studios are leaning harder on franchises to coax people into buying tickets, but many properties, including the four-film “Lego” series, have already been overworked.

Mr. Lin is betting that Rideback will strengthen and accelerate the creative process. It is a Hollywood twist on WeWork, the shared office space company. Mr. Lin said he was also inspired by Pixar’s “brain trust” sessions, in which directors and writers candidly critique one another’s work, and by “The Medici Effect,” Frans Johansson’s 2004 book about the ignition of the Renaissance.

“If you put a bunch of creative people from different backgrounds into one space, something magical will happen,” Mr. Lin said. “Studio lots used to be just that. You would walk around and everyone would be there. But studio lots aren’t as much fun anymore. They can feel corporate.”

Mr. Lin has 15 employees of his own. They work on the Rideback campus, where they are focused on finding a way forward for the “Lego” series, most likely with a new studio partner. (Universal is one option.) Other front-burner projects include an “Aladdin” sequel and a television spinoff; “Lethal Weapon 5,” with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover signed up to return; movies based on Cirque du Soleil shows; and a remake of the TV series “Walker, Texas Ranger.”

He also leases space to the actress Margot Robbie for her LuckyChap production company. Mr. Lin and Ms. Robbie are collaborating on “Barbed Wire Heart,” a film adaptation of Tess Sharpe’s crime novel. Other Rideback tenants include the “Suicide Squad” writer-director David Ayer, two animation companies (Warner Animation Group, Animal Logic) and the Conner literary agency. About 100 people work at Rideback in total.

The complex has “artists in residence” like Adam Ward, who creates sculptures made of Lego bricks. The saloon is used for nighttime events, like panel discussions and mixers.

Rideback also has three script-development programs. An “incubator,” for instance, operates from the barn and is sponsored by MRC, an entertainment company with credits like “Knives Out” and “Ozark.” Five fledgling writers from diverse backgrounds are each paid $200,000 for a six-month residency. They help one another create shows that can be shopped to cable networks and streaming services. Experienced showrunners like Glen Mazzara (“The Walking Dead”) serve as mentors.

Mr. Lin joined with CBS and the TV writer Craig Turk (“The Good Wife”) to create a similar initiative. The campfire, as this one is known, pairs movie writers who want to break into television with experienced CBS writers, according to Lindsey Liberatore, Rideback’s executive vice president for television. Two campfire show ideas were recently sold to CBS.

“The best feedback comes from fellow creators,” Mr. Lin said. “We want to bring people and ideas together to elevate the potential of both.”

It must be said: Mr. Lin can come across like a goody-two-shoes. He cites Fred Rogers, a.k.a. Mister Rogers, as one of his inspirations. Once a week, Mr. Lin will excitedly tell you, Rideback sends writers to a nearby grade school; they help children from immigrant families write plays. Another Rideback program centers on a shelter for homeless women and their children.

Here in the narcissism capital, Mr. Lin’s sweetness and sunshine can be hard to take at face value. Rideback is a business. This must just be the way he shrouds his ambition.

But people who know him insist otherwise.

In Hollywood “people are really good at appearing to be decent and good,” Modi Wiczyk, a co-founder of MRC, said. “Dan is actually decent and good. He is also incredibly ambitious — you don’t get to where he is by accident. All of those qualities can be hard to reconcile in one person.” Mr. Wiczyk met Mr. Lin in the 1990s as classmates at Harvard Business School.

The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Mr. Lin, 46, is part of a generational changing of the guard in Hollywood. With lions like Jerry Bruckheimer, 76, Joe Roth, 71, and Joel Silver, 67, having a harder time finding hits or easing toward retirement, people like Jason Blum, 50, Ava DuVernay, 47, and Mr. Lin have built production companies that tap into new cultural currents, notably inclusion. As it happens, Mr. Blum’s wildly successful Blumhouse Productions and Ms. DuVernay’s newer Array Creative Campus are also located in Filipinotown, which borders downtown Los Angeles.

“It’s looking at a systemic problem, which is the lack of diverse voices — how to feed new talent into a system that has been rather closed,” said Lynda Obst, a longtime producer (“Interstellar”) and the author of “Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business. She added, “As streaming takes over, that is more important than ever.”

The money to build Rideback — and the philosophy behind it — came from a court battle. About a decade ago, Mr. Lin and two partners helped Legendary Pictures obtain remake rights to “Godzilla.” In 2013, the relationship between Legendary and the three producers curdled, resulting in multiple lawsuits. After losing several court rulings, Legendary settled. “Godzilla” took in $525 million in 2014.

“Fighting them in court brought me to the brink of personal bankruptcy, but it ended up with them writing me a huge check,” Mr. Lin said. “My wife and I, we are religious people, and we prayed about what to do with the money, and the answer involved lifting others up.”

He pointed to a program he calls the Rideback Collective. It is a secretive, invitation-only group of 25 film writers. Twice a month, a subset of the group participates in a version of the Pixar brain trust sessions — one member takes a vexing project (a cut of a film or an unfinished script) to a session and the group spends about three hours in the evening brainstorming about improvements. It’s all pro bono, and Mr. Lin declined to disclose the participants.

“Some of the projects may be set up at studios, and the creators may not want the studio to know that they’re struggling,” he said.

Mr. Lin provides space and administrative support. He does not receive producing credits on collective projects, although he is betting that some collective members will want him to produce their work. Several members, in fact, have been discussing a financing arrangement with Mr. Lin.

He also has access to the workshops. For instance, collective members viewed an early version of “Aladdin” and suggested improvements, he said. Disney then hired a writer to compose pages for additional photography. “Aladdin,” directed by Guy Ritchie from a screenplay credited to John August, collected $1 billion at the box office over the summer.

Meg LeFauve, a writer known for her work on Pixar films, runs the Rideback Collective. “Writing can be a very solo, lonely job,” she said. “You leave these sessions with insights into how other big story brains work.”

Mr. Lin started his career as an executive at Warner Bros., where he steered “The Departed,” Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning 2006 drama about the Boston mob. He became a producer in 2008. His early producing tenure was marked by hits (“Sherlock Holmes”) and misses (“Gangster Squad”).

In 2010, Mr. Lin started to vacation in rural Bigfork, Mont., with his wife and sons. It was there, he said, that someone mentioned the term “rideback.”

“It’s a cowboy word,” he said. “When you fall, the others make sure you aren’t left behind. They ride back to help you.”