I don’t know all the ins and outs of Relativity‘s continuing struggles, but it always seems like the studio is on the verge of collapsing. How studio head Ryan Kavanagh manages to keep the company alive is almost like the greatest illusion David Copperfield has never performed. At any rate, at the beginning of the year, Relativity and Kavanagh surprised Hollywood by announcing they had acquired Kevin Spacey and his producing partner Dana Brunetti‘s Trigger Street Productions, and hired them to run the studio. But it wasn’t to be.
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THR reports that Spacey has exited his role as Chairman of Relativity. "It is with much thought and consideration and after many discussions with those I trust most that I have decided not to go through with accepting the role of chairman at Relativity Studios," Spacey said in a statement. "I can think of very few things more exciting to an actor than being given the opportunity to work with fellow actors, writers and directors with the ability to bring their creative works to light. That was, and still is, a very powerful idea for me. However, as Relativity emerges from bankruptcy and now that I have a much deeper understanding of the specifics of the amount of work that will be needed to shepherd the company through this transition, I have concluded it is work that I neither have the time nor the wherewithal to take on."
Translation: Spacey doesn’t want to deal with bringing a studio back from the brink of extinction, which is pretty understandable.
So that leaves Brunetti, who will now run Relativity alongside Kavanagh. He should be expected to greenlight projects and shepherd the process by which the studio assembles a Creative Advisory Board, presumably to ensure that they are making wise investments. It’s a pretty big career movie for Brunetti, who has become something of a wunderkind in Hollywood, though has also rubbed some in the business the wrong way with his ego and ambition (this recent Vanity Fair profile is a great read).
