Steve gilula biography

Steve Gilula is known for The Third Animation Celebration: The Movie (1990), Animation Celebration (1986) and The International Tournee of Animation: Volume.
Steve Gilula is Former Co-Chairman at Fox Searchlight Pictures Inc. See Steve Gilula's compensation, career history, education, & memberships.
Chairman Gilula said the big test to see if he and fellow Searchlight chairman Nancy Utley would survive Fox's 2019 acquisition by Disney is when they screened.

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Searchlight Shake-Up: Steve Gilula and Nancy Utley to Retire

In a stunning development on the eve of the Academy Awards, Disney announced Tuesday that longtime Searchlight Pictures chairmen Nancy Utley and Steve Gilula will be retiring from the specialty division, home of numerous Oscars.

At Sunday’s Oscar telecast, for example, Searchlight’s Nomadland is considered a frontrunner for best picture, among other top awards. Utley and Gilula told staffers of their looming exit in the coming weeks during a lunchtime town hall.

Searchlight veterans Matthew Greenfield and David Greenbaum, Searchlight’s longtime heads of production, have both been promoted to president, Searchlight, and will jointly run the company.

News of the leadership transition comes two years after Fox Searchlight became part of the Disney empire as a result of the Disney-21st Century Fox merger. Then-Disney CEO Bob Iger repeatedly extolled the value of Fox Searchlight, which gave his movie studio a greater foothold in the awards business.

Since then, the landscape has changed dramatically,

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Hollywood couple, behind Searchlight Pictures' five Oscar-winning films including Nomadland, call it quits after 21 years

One of corporate Hollywood’s most enduring double acts is calling it quits.

Steve Gilula and Nancy Utley, senior executives at Searchlight Pictures for 21 of its 27 years, who shaped global culture with Oscar-winning hits like 12 Years a Slave, Black Swan, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Slumdog Millionaire, announced their surprise retirement on 20 April. They will leave the Disney-owned specialty studio by the end of June, adding to a conspicuous changing of the guard at The Walt Disney Co.

“You don’t want to be the show that stays on the air two seasons too long,” Utley said. “Get out while everything is still going well.”

She was joking — mostly. Searchlight has long been the gold standard of art film studios, packing its slate with diverse offerings long before Hollywood got the memo, and thriving in a changing marketplace — the DVD collapse, the rise of streaming competitors — even as once-formidable competitors like The Weinstein Co imploded. The l

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Stephen
Gilula

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Chairman

Gilula said the big test to see if he and fellow Searchlight chairman Nancy Utley would survive Fox’s 2019 acquisition by Disney is when they screened their movie “Jojo Rabbit,” about a boy in Nazi Germany whose imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler, and thankfully the top brass approved. It didn’t hurt that their specialty division had won four Oscars (including best picture and director) for “The Shape of Water” and two for best actress for “The Favourite,” starring Olivia Colman, and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” with Frances McDormand, over the previous two years. In 2020, “Jojo” won an adapted screenplay Oscar for director Taika Waititi and five other nods, and Searchlight went into awards season with festival favorite “Nomadland,” helmed by Chloé Zhao and starring McDormand.

News from Variety

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It’s “business as usual” at Fox Searchlight Pictures, despite the chang