Michael Phillips

Michael Phillips born June 29 1943 is an American film producer Phillips was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island His mother Shirley was a schoolteacher and housewife his father Larry was a garment manufacturer They later became dealers in ancient Asian art Phillips received a BA in history from Dartmouth College and a Juris Doctor from New York University School of Law After being admitted to the New York Bar in 1969 he worked as a securities analyst on Wall Street In 1971 he and his wife moved to Malibu California and produced their first film Steelyard Blues starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland In 1972 Phillips along with his thenwife Julia Phillips and producer Tony Bill financed the development of the screenplay The Sting for 3500 in total In 1973 the film received the Academy Award for Best Picture Michael and Julia were the first husbandandwife team to win the Best Picture award The couple then produced Taxi Driver which would go on to win the Palme DOr at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival and Steven Spielbergs Close Encounters of the Third Kind In 1984 his production company Mercury Entertainment went public with the intention to capitalize on his prior successes Mercury planned to produce three to five films a year in the 10million range with operating and development costs to be paid by ABC Motion Pictures while production financing was provided by the major studios The 1984 film The Flamingo Kid and the 1991 film Dont Tell Mom the Babysitters Dead were not as successful as hoped and in 1992 Philips offered to take the company private repurchasing outstanding stock at seven cents on the dollar In 1986 he teamed up with Michael Douglas to launch a new company to produce independently financed features and has option to buy Douglas company Big Stick Inc In 2006 Mercury Entertainment was merged with Debmar Studios to form DebmarMercury now a wholly owned subsidiary of Lions Gate Entertainment The Sting was inducted into the Producers Guild of Americas Hall of Fame granting each of its producers a Golden Laurel Award In June 2007 Taxi Driver was ranked as the 52ndbest American feature film of all time by the American Film Institute In December 2007 Close Encounters was deemed culturally historically or aesthetically significant by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry Description above from the Wikipedia article Michael Phillips licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia