Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and his producing partner, Fred Berger, were working at a company called Automatik when they got involved with “Longlegs.” (Berger has an executive producer credit, while Kavanaugh-Jones was a producer.) Dan Kagan explained that, early in the process, Perkins suggested bringing Kavanaugh-Jones on board since the three of them had worked together before. “And frankly at the time, for myself, I had just started indie producing and we both saw obvious value in Brian being the godfather of all this, to help us with casting and whatever else [the production needed],” Kagan said. By the time the film was in post-production, Automatik merged with Range Media Partners, the fourth company to get their logo in front of “Longlegs.”
In addition to being on the ground during production, Kavanaugh-Jones was instrumental in helping to facilitate the casting of Nicolas Cage as the title character.
“I’ve known Nic Cage’s manager for 20 plus years,” he told me. “I was an agent with him at CAA. When we started to figure out that we had to cast the movie in order to unlock the financing, unlock the whole process, I said, ‘What about Nic Cage?’ And Oz got very excited about that. My job as a producer then is to just create an opportunity and an option for him. I’m not going to cast the movie, Oz is going to cast the movie. Oz is going to be the one that then connects with the actor, but I called Mike Nilon, [Cage’s] manager, and he got excited about it. He read it overnight, which was really cool, and he handed it to Nic. And Nic read it in, I can’t remember, like two days. Sometimes it’s ‘Waiting for Godot,’ right? You’re waiting two months for an active read, and then you finally get a pass and you’re like, ‘Did they ever read it?’ Nic read it right away, got really excited, and got on the phone with Oz.”
“I don’t believe we’d have Nicolas Cage without him,” Kagan said of Kavanaugh-Jones. “He oversaw the Neon deal. He was incredibly close with Neon on the conversations about the marketing and everything, and brought Range into that conversation.”
We’ve previously covered this film’s masterful marketing campaign, and while I assumed Neon was the only company that concocted and executed that campaign, several of the movie’s producers weighed in as well, and Range was an integral part of its success. “One of the reasons that Fred and I merged our company in with Range, what’s been pretty phenomenal about it is, when I was thinking about other things we were doing, I brought in our entire audience awareness and digital department to help with the campaign with ‘Longlegs,'” Kavanaugh-Jones explained. “I just want to highlight that as something I’m really proud of.”
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