Mr. Hollywood

Springfield native-turned-LA showbiz mogul Marc Whitmore moves back to do what he does best: promote the arts in a bustling community.

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Marc Whitmore is glad to be back. A longtime successful promoter, agent and talent manager in the heart of Hollywood over the last four decades, Springfield native Whitmore has a career that touches almost every facet of the entertainment biz. But despite the success he achieved on the West Coast, he still yearned for a life he left behind in the Ozarks so long ago, and not because it’s some hokey hole-in-the-ground where he could forget the big city.

On a trip back home, Whitmore saw promise in the burgeoning mini-metropolis, and decided he wanted to invest his own talent for managing talent into 417-land. But he still wanted to maintain his connections in Los Angeles and use his influence for the betterment of local arts. After mulling over the logistics of a 1,500-mile commute (“Will I still be able to make a lunch in L.A.?” he wondered), he talked it over with his wife and decided to commit to a dual life in the West and the Midwest. Already big things are happening in 417-land as a result.

Six Degrees of Bagger Vance

I meet with Whitmore to discuss his plans at a Starbucks, where he appears to be on a first-name basis with the entire staff. (“I’m so glad there’s one within walking distance, I’m here every day,” he says.) I don’t necessarily expect some sleek, tanned Hollywood hotshot, but Whitmore’s Midwestern affability catches me off guard. After I prod him a little, he tells me his back story with the ease of someone who’s been talking to the media for longer than I’ve been alive. Whitmore was born in 1963. “I grew up watching people like Roy Rogers,” he says. “And he was one of my first clients.” After moving to Hollywood, Whitmore quickly found work as an agent. After the initial head rush, Whitmore found that Hollywood, aside from the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” assumption about the interconnectedness of the movie scene, is more attuned to the outside than you might think. It didn’t take long for Whitmore to realize that not just movies, but all aspects of entertainment in Los Angeles, and on a grander scale, America, are attached in one way or another. One thing Whitmore learned: Many of the same artists share talent management. “I started working as a booking agent, and then I found it was natural to move into managing acts,” says Whitmore. After some prodding for name-dropping, he admitted that Prince and Denise Williams were early clients.

“After years working for someone else, I opened my own management company [Whitmore, Jackson and Burkhart]. And one of the first things we did was branch into film.” Rather than focus on single clients, film was a natural way to progress further up the Hollywood hierarchy. Using his contacts, Whitmore began looking into producing a movie with his partners. “We read the script for a little movie called The Legend of Bagger Vance, and we loved it,” he said. “Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman were set to star, and we figured we could do the whole thing for $45 million. But when we got the numbers back, and they said it would be more like $150 million, we pulled out.”

It became clear there were larger, more difficult things at play, even more difficult than landing Morgan Freeman to portray a golf caddy: getting a film into distribution. Thinking he had lost a sure thing, Whitmore decided he was on the wrong side of entertainment. “They said that all the additional money was for distribution, actually getting people interested in screening the thing. So I figured I was in the wrong business and got into distribution.” So their film producing days were over; and if you’re keeping score, Bagger Vance, made years later and starring Matt Damon and Will Smith, ended up being one of the biggest flops of 2000.

Indies

Whitmore decided it was time to focus on independent film, with its easier schedules and lack of immense red tape. Soon, Whitmore was producing up to five indies a year. While this may sound like quite an ambitious amount, Whitmore assured that indies are much easier to produce and are rarely encumbered with the standard fees and distributing costs of even one Bagger Vance. Using his burgeoning influence, Whitmore was able to get backing for independent films like 1996’s The Spitfire Grill and Matthew McConaughey’s Hands on a Hardbody, a little-seen documentary about a contest in Texas wherein the person who could keep their hand on the hood of a Nissan Hardbody truck for the longest won it.

“That one was fun, because Quentin Tarantino showed up to the premiere, and then the next night he brought about 20 friends and it was like ‘That’s our film, and he thinks it’s cool!’”

Whitmore says he saw how making movies could be fun, how his career as a mover-and-shaker in the arts could translate beneficially and not just monetarily, and soon became absorbed in the movie circuit. “We got to go to the film festivals in Cannes, Sundance, TriBeCa and Toronto, and try to get people interested in our movies,” he says. The work required him to log more than 120,000 miles of travel a year. After a while, he realized it didn’t really matter if he lived in Los Angeles or not. “I kept an office in Burbank, but it didn’t matter whether I lived there or not,” he says. “I traveled so much anyways, I didn’t have to live in Los Angeles.” And so he decided that he was ready to give it up and live where he wanted to live. He could’ve chosen anywhere, but decided on 417-land.