The Pohlad Empire (Part Four): Art for Art's Sake

“Listen man, you're the artist. Right? You want God. You should have God.”
—Love & Mercy (Bill Pohlad, 2014)

We've spent the last three pieces in this series documenting how one man made his money and shaped his world. We know more about Carl Pohlad now, and we already know something (and we'll soon learn more) about Jim and Joe Pohlad, too. Today, though, let's talk about how one other Pohlad made (and lost) his money. By the time we're done, I'm betting you'll wish Bill Pohlad's passion had been baseball.

The nice thing about being a billionaire is having, for lack of a better term, “f*** you” money. Steve Cohen, the hedge fund guy (not to mention finance crimes guy) and New York Mets owner, basically suggested as much when he scored Carlos Correa under the San Francisco Giants’ feet.

“No one likes to spend money. But this is the price,” he told Jon Heyman in the New York Post. After all, when you buy a formaldehyde shark, maybe at some point you decide you don’t really care about a return.

For more on the history of the Pohlad family and their business interests, please see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 5 of this series.

If you read an interview with Bill Pohlad, one of the three sons of Carl, you might get a sense that he’s careful with his money.

“I was always very conscious of people who go to Hollywood for two years and get taken to the cleaners," Pohlad once said. "I didn’t want to just run through money to entertain my passion.”

But when you look at what he’s producing, maybe you get the sense that sometimes it’s “f*** you” money, after all. A gay romance about cowboys made before Obergefell. An experimental coming-of-age film by a known recluse. An NC-17 sensual historical spy romance in Mandarin. Even if you move past the notion of superhero and CGI spectacles, these aren’t necessarily the kind of projects that even bring in arthouse audiences.

To turn personal for a second: When I left college, I wanted to become a film critic and wrote for various outlets in the early 2010s. I eventually became way more interested in industry finance, and those who balanced the money questions of making art. As a Minnesotan, Pohlad seemed like an interesting figure. He was out there making the kind of films that I wanted to see. He wasn’t the creative force behind them, just the money man. But in an era in which finding anyone with money to support your art is engaging in a hostile battle of the wits, Pohlad was on the artists’ side. 

Bill’s story also tells us something about risk and reward in an industry where you have to depend on individuals, with chaotic results. As we saw, Carl made his money by siphoning off profits from one business to put into another, stripping away something good. In a very different industry, Bill used his money differently. He invested in talent, no matter the cost.

Of his three brothers, Bill was always the artistic one, and took the chance in 1990 to form River Road Entertainment and direct his first movie. But Old Explorers was a disaster, both financially and artistically. Pohlad decided to work in media instead, making industrials and commercials for Northwest Airlines (of course owned by Carl at the time), among other projects.

Bill would wait another 15 years to dip his toes into Hollywood again, setting a deal with Focus Features, a specialty subsidiary of Universal run by James Schamus (full disclosure: a former mentor of mine). When the script for Brokeback Mountain came across his desk, he wanted to take a chance, and a big one.

While Universal could have put up some of the money, Bill covered the whole thing. According to CAA agent Rick Hess, who became his on-the-ground man in the industry, he provided all $10 million to make the risky film.

“I credit him with being tasteful and shrewd. He’s gone to places other people wouldn’t go,” Hess said. Brought to fruition via the vision of director Ang Lee, Brokeback quickly became a cultural phenomenon. While Pohlad initially did raise his eyebrow at the sex scenes, something that for many audiences would be their first experience of seeing two men on screen in coitus, he later remarked “you don’t try to second-guess the filmmaker.”

The film would earn $178 million across the globe (much more in secondary markets), not to mention critical acclaim and numerous Oscars. Bill’s $10 million bet paid off impressively.

The next set of films would include a number of ambitious ideas: Robert Altman’s Minnesota-based swan song A Prairie Home Companion, Sean Penn’s meditative Into the Wild, and Lee’s brazen follow-up Lust, Caution. Bill grew up a fan of Hollywood movies, but decided that he was in the business to focus on being an alternative to them.

“I always wanted the company to have a personality and not just be the result of a committee or a corporate decision,” he said. Bill started to see the complications in the industry, though. While he could finance films, he still relied on major studios to release them. So Bill took $30 million and formed his own distribution company with New York producer Bob Berney, called Apparition. 

Apparition was short-lived, but it was not without creative energy. Bill helped bring Jane Campion’s Bright Star, the cult classic Black Dynamite, and Joan Jett biopic The Runaways to US audiences. Ultimately, the failure had as much to do with a clash of two differently-motivated businessmen. As Berney put it: “I like Bill; it wasn't personal. But he's a producer and a producer/filmmaker at heart. Distribution is a different business: You have to find movies and love them as much as your own. That's hard for producers.”

As Apparition closed down, Bill sold the distribution rights to a unique film he had been helping finance for years. This film would be the rarest opportunity of his lifetime: working with director Terrence Malick on The Tree of Life.

Malick was considered one of the most enigmatic directors of the 1970s, only making two films—Badlands and Days of Heaven—before essentially leaving the industry for two decades. His poetic style was as anti-Hollywood as you could get. In his WWII epic The Thin Red Line, the camera spends more time observing how wind moves through the trees and the wings of a butterfly than George Clooney. The Tree of Life was Malick’s most ambitious project—it was not only a family drama set in Texas in the 1950s, but also the story of the universe. There were special effects showing the birth of galaxies and CGI dinosaurs.

Malick’s style doesn’t work well for financing. There are no shot plans for the day, with Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shooting footage constantly around them. Takes were not necessarily variations of the same actor performing the same lines, but could be entirely different in tone or camera movement. The editing was even more ambitious in both style and scope. According to the one of the editors, “We had folders for Earth, Sky, Water, Animals, Miscellaneous, and then within those, bins that were more specific.” The idea was something almost based on association and feeling, rather than narrative needs.

So why did Bill take a chance? As Bill told the Los Angeles Times, “I would love it if we came out on the positive side [financially], but it’s not the only criterion in this case, because it’s such a special film.” Bill knew he was working with an important artist, and he was willing to let the artist take the risks. While he did provide notes and ideas, he knew his job was also to let the artist do his thing. At one point, Pohlad and Malick were rushing the film to prepare for the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. But rather than put out a bad product, Pohlad decided to let Malick wait and spend an entire additional year editing the film.

“After all this time, having so much anticipation, simply in our own minds, we just didn’t want it to go out half-baked,” he said at the time. Just to repeat that, Pohlad was out millions of dollars, and rather than rush for profit, decided to let any returns wait an entire year.

In 2014, Bill finally lived out his dream of directing once again, in the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, which covered the production of the now-classic album Pet Sounds. When asked how he balanced his financial side and his artistic side, Bill responded, “That disappeared once we started working; the collaborative process had its own momentum, and when you get rolling you can’t doubt yourself because that’ll kill it.”

Recent times have been more difficult for Bill. The independent film scene that was once his bread and butter has dried up due to consolidation and financialization that has made it much harder to fund films and see a return. Maybe you can just make a deal with Netflix or Amazon, but then you can’t control the product. From every interview I read, Bill wants artists to be artists. He was able to recently direct one more film, once again about music, entitled Dreamin' Wild.

Bill Pohlad described his father, Carl, as a shrewd businessman. He knew Hollywood types, and many moguls wanted his investments. But he saw it as too unprofitable, too much steeped in risk. As Bill described it, “He never had an opportunity to mess around with how he was feeling, ‘Do I want to do this,’ or, ‘Is this going to be fulfilling.’ So it’s a little harder for a son to come along and want to be in the film business.”

And yet, it’s hard to say who made the better investments that will last beyond one’s lifetime.

At some point, the Minnesota Twins might not exist, whether for reasons specific to the team or specific to baseball.. I do believe, however, that films like The Tree of Life, Love & Mercy, and 12 Years a Slave will certainly exist in some form. And anytime someone watches them, the name “Pohlad” will be there.

In Part Five, we’ll finally turn to the current state of the Pohlad Empire and why the sale announcement finally came.