Michael Almog, president of D.H. Blair Film Capital Fund and executive producer
of City Lights Pictures, is in the business of creating dreams from nightmares.
As coproducer of the gory teen revenge film Tamara (scheduled for a 2006
release), he and partner J. Morton Davis, CEO of D.H. Blair Investment Banking,
offered equity in their film through a capital fund, with a minimum investment
of only $25,000 and a low-risk strategy of preselling distribution rights.
Almog, who was also executive producer of the John Waters film A Dirty Shame, is
an immigrant who grew up singing bluesy ballads on a kibbutz and now works out
of Blair’s 19th-century, wood-paneled Wall Street offices. He is also
bankrolling a project that promises to help troubled youth upon their release
from prison. Through his nonprofit Pattern Foundation, he works with the
psychology department of the Rikers Island correctional facility on a work-study
program that offers teen offenders the chance to study the film industry and
later work in an related job.I grew up on a kibbutz. My parents joined it, but then left me there. I
loved it. I didn’t want to leave. I used to milk the cows and chase girls. I
became a musician, and my dream was to compose and play music for TV shows and
films. I still play music, but not as a business.
I didn’t want to leave the
kibbutz, but I wanted to go to America. I had a dream of seeing New York; I
wanted to have the freedom I had heard you could find here. I came more than 20
years ago, when I was 17. I came by myself with $50. I thought I could live on
that for weeks—we’re talking about a time when a box of cigarettes was 75 cents.
But when I got to customs and they asked if I was bringing any fruit or
vegetables, I said, “No.” I didn’t know that my mother had put a lemon in my
bag. She said the fragrance would be healing in case I didn’t feel good. The
customs inspector opened my bag, found the lemon. That was a $50 penalty, so my
adventure became bigger.
For three nights I slept at JFK airport, where I
would walk from one food stand to another. If I saw someone eating, I’d pretend
I was cleaning the table. Some people said, “That’s OK, I’ll clean up after
myself,” and I would say, “Please, let me clean.” Then I would eat any food they
left behind. It’s called surviving.
Some of them
want to become a
film editor in
two
weeks.
Some don’t want to
do anything but
save their lives. | After that I became a Hasidic. I studied
in a yeshiva for eight years. I was a diamond dealer, and I had a small company
that made jewelry. But I always played the piano, and I always had this dream to
pursue my art. I didn’t dream of having a concert, just playing music for
myself.
Then 12 years ago I started working for a company that made
television shows. Three months after I started, the owner called me into his
office and said, “I have to fire everyone now because the company is bankrupt.”
I told him I thought the company could do well under the right management, so he
challenged me. He said, “You’re getting so much money, why don’t you take over
the company?” That is just what I did. I bought the company for a couple of
hundred thousand dollars. Four years later I sold it to a Spanish telecom
company.
A few years later, I moved to City Lights Media [a film and
television production facility], where I became a partner with the three
brothers who founded it: Danny, Jack and Joe Fisher. One day I went to visit a
friend who was a teacher at the Friends of Island Academy, the Manhattan high
school for juvenile offenders imprisoned at Rikers Island. He introduced me to
the director, and I asked, “What’s the success rate here? What percentage of the
students get out of jail and stay out?” He told me it was 30 percent. “That’s
impossible,” I replied.
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