Lynn Hirschberg on Bob Berney and Newmarket Films, for The New York Times Magazine:
The extraordinary success of [Bob] Berney and Newmarket Films (which is owned by Berney and two British financiers, William Tyrer and Chris Ball, who live in Los Angeles) has not gone unnoticed by the studios. This fall, Tom Freston, co-president of Viacom, which owns Paramount, approached Newmarket about purchasing it. The arrangement would be similar to the original deal between Miramax and Disney...''In the past few years, independent films have become big business,'' says Sherry Lansing, the outgoing chairwoman of Paramount. ''They are not just quality films that you stick in your release schedule like filler...Most of the time, those films would come from the ranks of the independents, like Newmarket.''
