Thom Mount

Thom Mount (born May 28, 1948) is the former President of Universal Pictures and one of America's most well-known independent producers.

Biography

Born in Durham, North Carolina, Thomas Henderson Mount grew up in the sleepy southern town, graduating from Durham High School and, like so many of his generation, leaving home to travel across America. Following graduation from Bard College, Mount went to CalArts to earn a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts.

In 1973, Mount was hired at Universal Pictures as an assistant to then Vice-President Ned Tanen. Mount oversaw the development on numerous black exploitation films and the Richard Pryor hits "Car Wash", "Which Way is Up?" and "Bustin’ Loose". After brief stints working for Roger Corman (whose "Frankenstein Unbound" he would later produce in 1990), Danny Selznick and Ned Tanen of MCA/Universal, Mount was given responsibility for producing low-budget films for Universal.

In 1976, at the age of 26, Mount was named President of Universal Pictures, achieving perhaps his greatest satisfaction when appointed to the position his former boss Tanen had held less than a decade earlier.

Mount was an innovator at Universal and in the industry as a whole. In an age when studios only focused on big, expensive blockbusters, and over a decade before smaller mini-studios such as Fox Searchlight, Miramax or Sony Pictures Classics came into prominence or were even developed, Mount's Universal became the first studio to focus on smaller budget movies. He developed an independent division of the studio called the “Youth Unit,” which was devoted to low-budget pictures targeting a young audience and featuring new writers, directors and actors. The Youth Unit produced such well-known films as "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", "The Breakfast Club", "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie", "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life" and others. In addition, Mount also created and headed MCA/Universal's theatrical division which helped produce such Broadway shows as "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" (1979) and "Nuts" (1980).

Both "TIME" and "New York Magazine" labeled Mount as one of Hollywood's new “Baby Moguls” due to his remarkably quick ascent to producing success and executive status.

Mount ran Universal from 1976 to 1983, overseeing production on 140 films, mainly high concept comedies, action films, horror films and adult drama. Some of the hits made during his tenure include "Car Wash" (1976), "Smokey and the Bandit" (1977), "National Lampoon's Animal House" (1978), "Coal Miner's Daughter" (1980), "Missing" (1982), "Psycho II" (1983) and "Scarface". According to legend, Mount had to go on the set and coax Al Pacino to come out of his trailer after Pacino had gotten so caught up in his role as gangster Tony Montana that he became paranoid.

After leaving Universal in 1983, Mount founded his own company, The Mount Company, and developed such feature films as "Can't Buy Me Love" (1987), which was released by Disney during the summer of 1987; "Tequila Sunrise" (1988), Warner’s Christmas hit that year starring Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell; "Bull Durham" (1988) starring Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon; Sean Penn’s first directorial effort, "The Indian Runner" (1991) which starred Charles Bronson, Valeria Golino and Dennis Hopper and was released through MGM; and Sidney Lumet's "Night Falls on Manhattan" (1996). Mount also developed a friendship and creative relationship with Roman Polanski and helmed production chores on three of the director's films: "Pirates" (1986), "Frantic" (1988) (which starred Harrison Ford) and "Death and the Maiden" (1994), which was first produced by Mount as a Broadway play. Directed by Mike Nichols and starring Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman, the play was a Broadway hit and a Tony Award winner. Roman Polanski directed the film version for Mount in Paris, starring Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley and Stuart Wilson. The film was released through Fine Line Features. In addition, Mount executive produced Oliver Stone’s "Natural Born Killers". Mount's taste in projects is best described by a sign kept in his office to remind him about what makes a good screenplay: "Make me laugh, make me cry, make me come, make me think, or leave me alone."

The Mount Company also made music videos for The Bangles, Los Lobos and Joe Cocker, as well as the 2-hour CBS movie "Open Admissions", starring Jane Alexander. With ABC-TV, the company produced the 4-hour miniseries "Son of The Morning Star", written by "E.T." scribe Melissa Matheson.

Mount was allegedly was the inspiration for the Michael Tolkin Hollywood novel "The Player", which was later turned into a film starring Tim Robbins and directed by Robert Altman.

Mount has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University and taught at Duke University under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. He is also Co-Founder of The Los Angeles Film School and was elected to two consecutive terms as President of the Producers Guild of America, an organization which he helped to revitalize.

Quotes

* "Hollywood regards the South as an ethnic backwater and a cultural backwater, and I think it is nonsense. I'd like to point out that anything from "Bull Durham" to "Smokey and the Bandit" to "An Officer and a Gentleman" has some sort of Southern setting, and there are lots of compelling commercial stories to be made there."

* "The worst enemy of American education is the tenured faculty. Anybody who's ever been to college knows that. If the L.A. Film School is valuable in any way to the educational community, it's as a laboratory for finding out what the possibilities for the future of education are--not just for this school, but for every school."

* After Columbine, Mount said: "It is not that violent pictures create more violence, but that the constant litany of "gratuitous" violence [emphasis added] is destructive of the fabric of the culture because it lowers our threshold for sensitivity to the issue."