About Us
CHAIRMAN - RICHARD BARTON LEWIS
Producer RICHARD B. LEWIS, the founder and CEO of Southpaw Entertainment, is the moving force in bringing Warner Bros' modern day musical fable August Rush to the screen. After producing 14 films and over 300 hours of television, the filmmaker steps up his screenwriting and songwriting in this new chapter of his career.
August Rush, now in post-production marks Lewis' return to Warner Bros. Pictures where he produced the major box-office success Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Lewis conceived the music driven fable August Rush outside the studio system, creatively and financially guiding it through its development, and then teamed up with director Kirsten Sheridan, an Academy Award nominee for In America. Along the way he assembled a stellar cast, including Freddie Highmore (Finding Neverland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Spiderwick Chronicles); Academy Award Winner Robin Williams; Golden Globe Award winner Jonathan Rhys Myers, (The Tudors, Match Point, M13); Keri Russell (Waitress, M13, The Upside of Anger); and Academy Award nominee Terrence Howard (Hustle and Flow, Crash), before partnering with Warner Bros.
Among the high powered creative team Lewis assembled for the picture were the Oscar winning composers Hans Zimmer (Pirates of the Caribbean, Gladiator, Driving Miss Daisy, The Lion King) and Mark Mancina (Training Day, Speed, The Lion King) who's previous collaboration was the mega-hit The Lion King. Cinematographer John Mathieson (Gladiator, Phantom of the Opera) and editor Bill Steinkamp (Out of Africa, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Scent of a Woman, and The Interpreter) rounded out the team. In addition to August Rush, Lewis has over 15 pictures in development at Southpaw including, The Box with director Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black) at Twentieth Century Fox, The Joint starring Jamie Foxx (Dreamgirls, Ray) which Lewis is co-writing with Jamal Joseph at Fox 2000, Out Of This World at United Artists which Alan Loeb (Things We Lost In The Fire, Lasse Halstrom's New Amasterdam) is writing, and Last Lights,with Gold Circle to be directed by the acclaimed Spanish director Daniel Calparsoro.
While a founding partner at Trilogy Entertainment for over 16 years, Lewis led the company's movie and television divisions in generating 10 motion pictures, 6 television series and 4 long-form movies, which together generated more than $1.5 billion dollars in gross revenue. Lewis and his former Trilogy partners burst onto the motion picture scene by producing two mega-hit films: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, and Sean Connery, and Ron Howard's Backdraft, starring Robert DeNiro, Kurt Russell, Rebecca DeMornay, Donald Sutherland and William Baldwin. Together, these films garnered four Academy Award nominations, resulted in two successful soundtracks, inspired a major theme park attraction at Universal Studios and were the number two and five most successful pictures of the year.
Lewis was also the primary force behind building a television division at Trilogy, whose prodigious line-up included the widely successful multi-award-winning Showtime series The Outer Limits (154 episodes), Showtime and the Sci-Fi Channel's Poltergeist: The Legacy (88 episodes) created by Lewis, the CBS Emmy-winning series The Magnificent Seven, and the double Emmy-winning first-run series, Fame L.A., also created by Lewis: the TNT original movies Houdini and Buffalo Soldiers; and the ABC event mini-series Peter Benchley's Creature, starring Craig Nelson and Kim Cattrall.
With a strong desire to get back into hands on movie making, Southpaw Entertainment was launched in 2003 by Lewis as an independently financed production and development company. It immediately co-financed and set into production two motion pictures; Eulogy, starring Ray Romano, Debra Winter, Hank Azaria, Kelly Preston, Zooey Deschaanel, Famke Janssen, Jesse Bradford and Rip Torn; and House of D, starring Robin Williams, Tea Leoni, David Duchovny, Anton Yelchin and Erykah Badu. Both films premiered in 2004 at the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals to rave reviews. Southpaw's third film, Brooklyn Rules written by Terence Winter, Emmy Award-winning head writer of HBO's The Sopranos, and starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Scott Caan, Alec Baldwin, Jerry Ferrara and Mena Suvari, was released Spring 2007.
Lewis' other well-known producing credits include the feature films Moll Flanders, starring Robin Wright Penn, Morgan Freeman and Stockard Channing; Blown Away, starring Jeff Bridges, Tommy Lee Jones, Lloyd Bridges and Suzy Amis, and Larger Than Life, starring Bill Murray, Matthew McConaughey and Janeane Garofalo.
Lewis is a graduate of UC Berkeley's department of Biological Anthropology, and received his master's degree from UCLA's School of Motion Picture and Television Production. Southpaw Entertainment is represented by Creative Artists Agency.