Meet our speakers, who are active leaders in the T.I.M.E. (Technology, Information, Media, Entertainment) areas.
Roy Lee
Founder & President, Vertigo Entertainment
Roy Lee (Producer) earned his first motion picture producing credit as Executive Producer on Gore Verbinski’s 2002 blockbuster The Ring. He went on to produce the 2004 haunted house horror The Grudge, based on the 2000 Japanese film Ju-On directed by Takashi Shimizu. The Grudge currently holds the record for the biggest opening weekend of all time for a horror film upon its October 2004 release. The Grudge 2 was released last year, starring Amber Tamblyn and Sarah Michelle Gellar, and directed by Takashi Shimizu, which topped the box office at $22 million in its opening weekend. October 2006 also saw the release of The Departed, a crime thriller at Warner Bros., directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, which grossed $27 million in its opening weekend, making it Scorsese’s biggest opening ever. The film went on to win four Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best screenplay.
A Korean-American born in Brooklyn and raised in Bethesda, Maryland, Lee earned a Bachelors degree from George Washington University and a law degree from American University. After a brief stint as a corporate attorney, Lee relocated from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles in 1996 to pursue a career in the film industry. He landed his first job with the production company Alphaville, where he worked on films such as The Mummy, The Jackal and Michael. With his experience tracking scripts at Alphaville, he later co-founded a website called ScriptShark.com, which allowed aspiring writers the opportunity to have their screenplays evaluated by industry professionals. This success led to an assignment with a talent management company where he tracked short films for distribution on personal computers.
As an independent producer and development executive, Lee (dubbed “The Remake Man” in a 2003 New Yorker profile) began importing films in 2001 from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Indonesia to be remade in the United States, selling the rights to American movie studios on behalf of their Asian distributors.
Together with partner Doug Davison, Lee founded Vertigo Entertainment in 2001, where the producing pair is in various stages of production and development on a multitude of projects including, The Invasion (a remake of the 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig under the direction of Oliver Hirschbiegel), a remake of the supernatural thriller Addicted (staring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Lee Pace and directed by Joel Bergvall and Simon Sandquist), The Strangers (a suspense thriller starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman and directed by Bryan Bertino), My Sassy Girl (a romantic comedy starring Elisha Cuthbert and Jesse Bradford and directed by Yann Samuell), Shutter (a horror thriller starring Rachael Taylor and Joshua Jackson and directed by Masayuki Ochiai), Old Boy, and a remake of the paranormal thriller The Eye (staring Jessica Alba and directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud).
A Korean-American born in Brooklyn and raised in Bethesda, Maryland, Lee earned a Bachelors degree from George Washington University and a law degree from American University. After a brief stint as a corporate attorney, Lee relocated from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles in 1996 to pursue a career in the film industry. He landed his first job with the production company Alphaville, where he worked on films such as The Mummy, The Jackal and Michael. With his experience tracking scripts at Alphaville, he later co-founded a website called ScriptShark.com, which allowed aspiring writers the opportunity to have their screenplays evaluated by industry professionals. This success led to an assignment with a talent management company where he tracked short films for distribution on personal computers.
As an independent producer and development executive, Lee (dubbed “The Remake Man” in a 2003 New Yorker profile) began importing films in 2001 from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Indonesia to be remade in the United States, selling the rights to American movie studios on behalf of their Asian distributors.
Together with partner Doug Davison, Lee founded Vertigo Entertainment in 2001, where the producing pair is in various stages of production and development on a multitude of projects including, The Invasion (a remake of the 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig under the direction of Oliver Hirschbiegel), a remake of the supernatural thriller Addicted (staring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Lee Pace and directed by Joel Bergvall and Simon Sandquist), The Strangers (a suspense thriller starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman and directed by Bryan Bertino), My Sassy Girl (a romantic comedy starring Elisha Cuthbert and Jesse Bradford and directed by Yann Samuell), Shutter (a horror thriller starring Rachael Taylor and Joshua Jackson and directed by Masayuki Ochiai), Old Boy, and a remake of the paranormal thriller The Eye (staring Jessica Alba and directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud).
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