During the four decades that Phil Knight spent building Nike into a merchandising and pop culture machine, he came to realize the company would outlast him. "Obviously, man is mortal," he said in April after stepping down as CEO. But facing mortality isn't easy. What would the 67-year-old marketing genius do next? Hit the lecture circuit? Too shy. Golf? Sure, but not every day. Spend time with the grandkids? That's no full-time position.
In fact, Knight tipped his hand back in 1998, when he gave $5 million to Vinton Studios. Will Vinton, the Oregon animator known for his dancing California Raisins commercials, was looking to open a Hollywood office so he could make movies. Knight, a Portland native, was eager to support local artists. "Vinton was on a roll," Knight says, "and I wanted to contribute as a passive investor." Within four years, Vinton had burned through the money but hadn't made a single animated film. The studio was nearly bankrupt when Vinton came back asking for more cash. By this time, the search for a successor at Nike had begun. Knight gave Vinton $450,000 more, but there were strings attached. He wanted control of the company.
Vinton's failure saved Knight from really retiring. "I got into the movies the same way John Kennedy became a war hero," he says. "They sunk my boat." He officially took over Vinton Studios in 2003 (later renaming it Laika, like the Russian dog launched into space in 1957). Now he's running the animation studio, even as he chairs Nike's board and keeps an office on campus. "Everybody wants a certain amount of stress," he says. "Most people have too much, but I didn't want too little, either."
The film industry offered an exciting next step for the self-described movie buff who goes to the theater twice a week and every night on vacation - no screening room for him. But what perhaps drove him most to take a leading role there was his son Travis. In 1997, Knight helped him get a job as a production assistant at Vinton; today, Travis is an animator with a seat on the board.
Knight says that the new venture offers "an excuse to work together," which is as effusive as he gets. But family has clearly become more important to Knight as he's gotten older. After his eldest son died in a scuba diving accident in 2004, Knight wrote a company-wide memo asking people to spend more time with their families in lieu of sending condolence letters. Today, father and son talk business every day, though Travis says he's "more of an artist than a business guy.''
Exercising the prerogative of a billionaire, Knight got face time with big names in his new industry. He met with top decisionmakers at Lions Gate, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros. - all studios buying animated movies. He received a personal show business tutorial from fellow CEO turned mogul Philip Anschutz, the Qwest Communications founder and a producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He recruited Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, to head up his animation efforts. Selick introduced him to former Fox Filmed Entertainment chair Bill Mechanic, who is producing Knight's first feature. The entertainment trades now cover the various comings and goings at Laika. And Daily Variety has written admiringly of Knight, asking, "Can pic marketers follow in Nike's footsteps?" Knight says, "You can't work too far outside the system. If one store doesn't want your shoes, you just go to another one. But there are only six or seven big companies in the movie business who can get a picture into theaters. You have to make friends down there."
In the fall of 2003, Knight flew to Los Angeles on his Gulfstream jet and met with Chris Meledandri, the president of 20th Century Fox Animation. Meledandri had just produced the hit Ice Age and was eager to work with Knight. After all, this was the guy who turned sneakers into status symbols. "I suggested that he develop a project with us," Meledandri says. "I wanted to see what he would bring to the marketing process." But Knight didn't want to team up with another studio, Meledandri says. "He wanted to do his own thing."
Which is to say, he wanted to try something new. While most of the animated films coming out of Tinseltown today are decidedly mainstream, cheerful productions - think Chicken Little - Knight's debut feature, Coraline, due by 2008, will be anything but. Adapted from Neil Gaiman's best-selling children's book, Coraline follows a little girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning) who finds a door to an alternate world. But don't imagine The Chronicles of Narnia, with its noble characters and happy ending. Gaiman's dark universe plays on a child's elemental fears. Behind the door, Coraline meets look-alikes of her family members who turn out to be not just creepy but dangerous. Selick brought the project with him to Laika, and Knight agreed to finance him as screenwriter and director. That decision was not without risk. While Selick directed Monkeybone and James and the Giant Peach, he has never been a huge box office draw. And he has never written a feature screenplay.
A second Laika feature film, Jack and Ben's Animated Adventure, is in preproduction. It will be written and directed by veteran animator Jorgen Klubien, who has worked on A Bug's Life, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King. But Klubien has never directed a full-length picture. Hiring a first-time director and screenwriter is no big deal for Knight; the CEO of Laika is a former Nike executive, Dale Wahl, who admits that he had to read a book about the movie business before he took the job. "When Phil Knight calls you and says he wants to talk to you about a job, you don't call back and say, 'I'm not interested,'" Wahl says. "The first thing out of my mouth was 'I don't know anything about this.'" Knight didn't care; he wanted someone he was comfortable with.
Knight has always been willing to hire people who don't seem to have the right experience and then let them learn on the job. It goes with his hands-off management style. He doesn't have an office at the Laika building; instead, he drops by once or twice a month and keeps in touch by phone. Still, he alone greenlights movies. He learned this approach from his track coach and Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman, who was known for sitting high in the stands at meets while competing coaches hovered trackside. Bowerman always said that by then, he'd done all he could.
Knight may be low-key, but he has already put about $9 million into Laika. Selick says Knight has given him everything he needs to develop the best look for Coraline. Selick is experimenting with a blend of stop-motion and CG animation to highlight the contrast between Coraline's two worlds, a technical feat that has never been achieved. Some 20 storyboard artists, illustrators, and model makers are already hard at work, helping bring Selick's vision to life. Knight gave the studio's staff nearly $5 million to make a film - an eight-and-a-half-minute CG animated short called Moongirl - and develop its style of computer-generated animation. The effort seems to be paying off. The director recently finished Moongirl and hopes it will be Laika's calling card; it was nominated for an Annie Award, the animation community's answer to the Oscars.
Although Knight will personally cover Coraline's $50 million-plus budget, he's looking for a distribution partner to share the costs. "It's a high-risk business,'' he says. "I don't think anybody should imagine this is going to be a cash cow." He is also planning to add to Laika's 45,000-square-foot building in Portland's industrial district and build his own CG studio on anothersite in the city.
All of this is very exciting for the team at Laika. And perhaps for Knight, but that's hard to tell. He has trouble making eye contact, often looking at the floor when he speaks. The shyness is no act. He is rarely seen in public without sunglasses on. Around Nike, he was famous for his monosyllabic responses to employee questions - when he spoke at all. Even now, getting answers from him is tough. Asked, for example, what kinds of movies he likes, his first response is "All movies." The second is "The full range." Three or four passes later, it comes out that Star Wars and Casablanca are among his favorites.
Rich outsiders have long flocked to Hollywood, looking for a second act in life. While their money is always welcome, they quickly become the butt of jokes about how little they know. But Knight has more credibility than most. Before him - before "Bo knows baseball" and the Air Jordan - the athletic shoe was one of the least exciting pieces of sports equipment around. Knight proved to have a gift not just for creating buzz, but for stirring up a frenzy - particularly within the coveted 18- to 34-year-old market, the same demographic the studios have been steadily losing to the Internet, videogames, and even cell phones.
If Laika succeeds, it will do more than affirm Knight's reputation as a brand-building machine. It will place him among a growing band of self-made businessmen who have pushed their way into the movies. They don't merely throw money at pictures; they take an active role in hiring producers and executive talent for their projects. This new breed includes real estate tycoon Bob Yari, who produced last year's critically acclaimed Thumbsucker; Broadcast.com cofounder Mark Cuban, whose media company is releasing the first major movie, Bubble, on DVD, in theaters, and on cable all on the same day; eBay's first president, Jeff Skoll, executive producer of Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana; Qwest's Anschutz; and Steve Jobs.
Of course, nobody thinks Laika is Pixar just yet. Least of all Knight, whose studio is named for a dog that died before the Sputnik 2's mission was completed, done in by stress and overheating. "We noticed that, but we just don't talk about it,'' Knight says with barely a hint of a chuckle. "We choose to focus on the great exploration instead."
Evelyn Nussenbaum (enussenbaum@aol.com) is an entertainment journalist in San Francisco.
credit F. Scott Schaefer; Stylist: Tina Skouras; Groomer: Maria Blandino
The former Nike CEO has put millions into his new animation studio.
Scene stealers: A poster for Laikaés first feature, Coraline
A shot from the studioés debut short, Moongirl
A shot from the studioés debut short, Moongirl
