Unapix: an indie to be reckoned with.

New production unit fulfills multimedia dreams

With all the megamergers taking place in the entertainment industry today, there are only a few distribution companies that can truly call themselves independent. Unapix Entertainment is one of them.

Originally known as Majestic Entertainment, the company was created in 1986 by Scott Hanock and Walter Baxter, who shared the goal of building a large distribution company for independent product. Hanock, who is now managing director of Unapix International, had the international expertise, and Baxter had the classic indie expertise.

However, the company had no financial base. "We desperately tried to bring in investors, but the time wasn't right. The banks weren't interested and the economy was bad," Hanock recalled. Despite its lack of capital, Majestic continued to grow, and with the help of a few lucky turns it was able to thrive. The first stroke of luck came in the person of Herbert Pearlman, who Baxter met on the golf course in Palm Springs, California. In 1990, Pearlman and his partner, David Lawl, acquired 50 percent of Majestic Entertainment through their venture Helm Resources.

Events took a sad turn when Baxter died of cancer in 1992. Mourning the loss of his partner, Hanock knew something good had to happen soon. Then the second stroke of luck hit, in the form of David Fox, who had just left his position as head of Syndication at Fox Lorber. Fox brought his domestic expertise to the team, while Pearlman and Lawl carried the finances. Majestic was now strong in both the domestic and international arenas. In 1992 David Fox became a partner, joining the other three partners on the Majestic team.

In 1993 Hanock saw the opportunity of taking the company public. Before making that big step in 1994, the partners changed the name of the company to Unapix Entertainment to mark its relaunch as a multimedia organization. "With the new capital as a publicly traded company, we became a small-cap-traded company," Hanock explained.

Unapix now began to focus on the domestic side by entering the film business and forming A-Pix Video, which was headed by Robert Baruc. Baruc became the company's fifth partner and, according to Hanock, A-Pix became a very lucrative unit. While Unapix was building up a domestic video business, it created its own domestic TV division and brought in Robert Miller to run it.

Soon after, Unapix entered the co-production business, created its own sales force and bought the home video company Mirimar. "Through our financing vehicles and sell-through sales force, we were able to vertically integrate, control all rights and offer producers a one-stop shop," Hanock said. "We now can offer an indie producer a fully integrated distribution system with our financing capabilities through being a public company. That's why indie producers are attracted to the company."

The next piece of the puzzle, Hanock explained, was a production unit: "We needed to create our own properties. ... During the last three years, we've been acting as executive producers and got a taste of what it's like to produce." So, in July, Unapix Entertainment formed Unapix Productions, a new network and cable programming production unit. The new operation is headed by the creative team of Jim Coane and Mike Fleiss. "Now that the non-U.S. networks have become as brand-conscious as their American counterparts, it has become increasingly important for Unapix to be in a position to offer these networks a variety of original first-run programming," Hanock said.

At roughly the same time, Unapix's film division, A-Pix, had started to do well in rental and sell-through and wanted to get into production as well. So Miller created Unapix Films. Now the company is producing small and medium-sized projects to feed its video label and its pay-per-view and domestic North American sales operations.

Now 13 years old, Unapix has weathered the ever changing global marketplace and has maintained its status as an independent. "We've watched the playing field being leveled off and swallowed up by the biggies. Unapix is rising up above all this and is truly a force to be reckoned with," Hanock boasted. Indeed, Unapix Entertainment has thrived amid the volatility of the industry and has grown from a four-person organization to one that is 80 people strong. The company now has offices in New York, Seattle and Los Angeles, as well as a branch in Amsterdam that serves Europe and one in Miami that caters to Latin America.

"We have become a multimedia company. We have a presence in electronic commerce and also have a Web site," Hanock said. But all this growth doesn't mean that Unapix will abandon its indie roots. "The advantage to being independent is that we can move much quicker in the atmosphere. We want to become a much larger company," Hanock admitted, "but we still want to maintain the flexibility we have with being an independent."