Michael Lynne, a Key Figure at New Line Cinema, Dies at 77

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/obituaries/michael-lynne-dead.html

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Michael Lynne, who helped engineer a bold expansion of the once tiny studio New Line Cinema that culminated in its release of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, one of the most successful movie franchises in history, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 77.

His daughter, Elizabeth Planet, said the cause was cancer.

Mr. Lynne was an entertainment lawyer in the early 1980s when he began advising his old Columbia Law School classmate Robert Shaye, who had founded New Line in 1967. He became the studio’s general counsel in 1984, the same year it released one of its biggest early successes, the horror movie “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which cost less than $2 million to make and brought in more than $25 million at the box office. He also joined the New Line board, and in 1986 he played a crucial role in taking the company public.

In 1990 Mr. Shaye made Mr. Lynne president and chief operating officer. That year also brought another huge hit for the studio, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” which was made for $13.5 million and earned 10 times that just in the United States.

“By staying tightfisted and narrowly focused and making some shrewd deals,” The New York Times wrote in 1991, “the company has defied the odds to survive for 24 years in a business that has been cruel to independents.”

The partnership between Mr. Lynne and Mr. Shaye was a complementary one. As Variety put it in 2004, “Lynne often is described as the smooth, button-down counterpart to Shaye’s gruff introvert.” The studio weathered box-office failures like “The Island of Dr. Moreau” in 1996, as well as a controversial 1998 article in Premiere magazine that accused New Line of fostering a boys’-club atmosphere where sexual harassment occurred.

Mr. Lynne’s expertise in financing served the company well. New Line especially liked movies that appealed to specific audiences, whether horror fans or young black audiences (as with the 1990 comedy “House Party”) or admirers of the offbeat (as with John Waters’s “Hairspray” in 1988). And it liked franchises, a preference that paid off in a big way with the three movies based on “The Lord of the Rings,” the J. R. R. Tolkien saga: “The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001), “The Two Towers” (2002) and “The Return of the King” (2003). The trilogy earned almost $3 billion worldwide. The third installment won 11 Oscars.

But Mr. Shaye had sold New Line to Ted Turner in 1993, and it ended up as part of Time Warner. In 2008 both he and Mr. Lynne were ousted as the parent company downsized the studio.

Mr. Lynne, though, already had other lives well underway — as a philanthropist, art collector and vintner. He had bought Bedell Cellars, a vineyard on Long Island, in 2000. It was not merely an investment.

“Make no mistake about it: Michael was a farmer, too,” Trent Preszler, who has worked at Bedell for more than 15 years and has been its chief executive since 2010, said by email. “He understood the importance of soil and weather and people in making fine wine.”

Michael Lynne was born on April 23, 1941, in Brooklyn. His father, Max, was a lawyer, and his mother, Sylvia (Mark) Lynne, was a homemaker.

He grew up in Brooklyn and received a bachelor’s degree at Brooklyn College in 1961 and a law degree at Columbia three years later. He served as counsel for Embassy Pictures and worked for the entertainment law firm Barovick & Konecky before he ran into Mr. Shaye one day in Greenwich Village.

Mr. Shaye pitched him about helping out with New Line, which was small and struggling at the time.

“He gave his spiel,” Mr. Lynne told Variety in 2004. “It didn’t sound that good to me.”

But a fruitful partnership began. Mr. Lynne was named New Line’s co-chief executive and co-chairman in 2001, and even ended up with an executive producer credit on several films, including the “Lord of the Rings” movies and the musical version of the earlier “Hairspray,” which New Line released in 2007.

Mr. Lynne married Ninah Plotkin in 1967. She and his daughter survive him, as do a brother, Richard; a sister, Sherry Kramer; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Lynne served on several boards, including that of the Museum of Modern Art. His love of art was evident at his vineyard; artists including Barbara Kruger and Mickalene Thomas were commissioned to create labels for his wines.

Mr. Lynne saw similarities between his movie career and winemaking.

“In both cases there are certain imponderables which you can’t control at all,” he told The Times in 2005 — the weather in winemaking, assorted vagaries in filmmaking. And, he noted, both creative processes take a long time, with no guarantee of success.

“Most of your wine that you are giving a more serious treatment to will be in barrels for a year or two and then ultimately get released in two to three years after harvest,” he noted, just as movies take years from conception to completion.

Mr. Preszler said Mr. Lynne, who became a wine connoisseur during his travels as a film executive, would often visit the cellars to sample new wines and render opinions. He recalled the time Mr. Lynne sampled a new cabernet franc.

“Michael swirled and sniffed and tasted,” Mr. Preszler said. “Then he paused: ‘It’s missing something. It needs a partner to round out the flavors. Have you thought about adding a little malbec?’ So the winemaker siphoned some malbec from another barrel and added 5 percent to the cabernet franc. Michael tasted it again, paused, and said, ‘That’s a winner.’ ”

The result became a top seller.