Rocking the boat: How two disenchanted Bay Street lawyers shook up the entertainment industry

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Ivan Schneeberg had an overwhelming feeling in his early 30s that he had, more or less, woke up one morning and found he was a partner at a blue-chip Toronto law firm with a thriving practice in the entertainment sector, great salary, super bright colleagues and, when he was being completely honest with himself, a burning secret desire not to be a corporate lawyer. It was as if he was in a “coma,” he recalled.

Fortunately for Schneeberg, David Fortier, an entertainment lawyer in the office next door and his linemate on the company hockey team, was suffering the same malaise.

As their friendship grew over post-game pints, they discovered that they both really loved the arts and culture. What they really hated, they agreed, was that they were always solving problems for their clients that were actually producing culture — films, television shows and the like.

Although the lawyers would be dutifully invited to parties with creative types and industry glitterati, it only reinforced their sense that they were stuck on the periphery of something fantastic, forever peering in.

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“We sort of looked at one another, and said, ‘This is what we love: we love the arts, we love culture, we love content,’” Fortier said. “And we knew each other well enough, and we trusted one another, and so we said, ‘Let’s just do this ourselves.’”

That was 18 years ago and the company Schneeberg and Fortier rebranded five years ago as Boat Rocker Media Inc. just joined the Toronto Stock Exchange in a $170-million initial public offering after a string of successes in the cutthroat entertainment industry.

Canadians, of course, and lawyers to boot, aren’t particularly known for audaciously reinventing themselves as producers who can build a thriving, internationally recognized, publicly traded entertainment company in the traditionally Hollywood-dominated industry.

A company, no less, with offices worldwide, the top-rated cable show among preschoolers in the United States and a documentary currently available on Apple TV+ about songbird Billie Eilish that teenagers are swooning over so much that it’s often on perpetual repeat.

“What the Boat Rocker Media guys have done is turn the tables,” said Christopher Byrne, a Canadian director with a cascade of credits to his name such as American Gods, Hannibal, 12 Monkeys and Star Trek: Discovery.

“Some people are shocked that from the land of Neil Young and Feist and Justin Bieber and other musical juggernauts come ideas and culture, and the Boat Rocker guys, they are part of this new wave.”

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Those guys, Fortier and Schneeberg, incorporated Boat Rocker Media in 2016 after heavy-hitter Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. signed on as majority shareholder at their company, Temple Street Productions, which was subsequently recast to reflect its growing ambitions.

With new money behind it, Boat Rocker Media went on a shopping spree, buying up production houses, opening an animation arm, securing distribution rights for various production libraries, branching into talent management and giving its founders fancy-sounding new titles as co-executive chairs.

The company today has 800 employees, which is a far cry from the two ex-lawyers’ humble beginnings in 2003, when they embarked on their new career path by wandering around the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) handing out business cards.

What the Boat Rocker Media guys have done is turn the tables

Christopher Byrne, director

“All it takes to be a producer is you walk around saying you are a producer,” Fortier said, speaking from experience.

What the rookies learned, post-TIFF and after making a half-hour kids’ comedy, a half-hour reality show and a half-hour adult comedy, was what, in those early years, stood as an industry truism: International buyers and distributors viewed Canadian-made film and television productions as cut-rate crap.

American shows — even those made in Canada — had stars, snazzy production qualities, glitz and glam, and, most of all, big money behind them. Canada was known for Wayne and Shuster and the King of Kensington.

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“Being taken seriously was the hardest part of being Canadian, and sometimes it still is,” Byrne said.

The Boat Rocker duo can relate. Their early forays into television while running Temple Street Productions may have caught on domestically, but collectively elicited a shrug — sometimes not even that — from major players south of the border and overseas.

“We had a systemic problem to overcome,” Schneeberg said.

What shifted the narrative was Being Erica, a quirky, perfect-for-the-moment production about a young woman with a mess of regrets, and her wacky, quote-spouting therapist, who would send her back in time to resolve her various issues.

The show caught on with audiences and caught the eye of BBC Worldwide, an international distributor, which bought a stake in Temple Street Productions in 2008. Fortier and Schneeberg now had international credibility and a new show, Orphan Black, was an even bigger hit than Being Erica.

The patch of sustained success taught them quite a few lessons, but the biggest was that they needed to be a multi-genre operation to survive.

They were going to provide it all — scripted shows (Orphan Black), unscripted shows (The Amazing Race Canada), kids and family programming (Wingin’ It) — which is pretty much what Boat Rocker Media was doing when the pandemic brought the industry to a screeching halt in March 2020.

Live-action productions dried up, but, at the same time, all us souls stuck at home started binging on content — Netflix reportedly added 37 million new subscribers in 2020 — on multiple platforms. As a result, Apple TV+, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Google-owned YouTube, traditional broadcasters, carriers of all stripes craved more and more stuff for their viewers.

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As a pure content producer, Boat Rocker was, as Fortier puts it, “platform agnostic.” In other words: it can produce whatever audiences crave in whatever form.

On that note, Boat Rocker hired 100 animators for the kids’ programming division during the pandemic, even as other divisions were bleeding tens of millions in lost revenue. They also started talking seriously with Watsa and Co. about going public to further scale up the business.

The process wasn’t entirely painless. They had initially hoped the IPO would raise $175 million, but fell a few million bucks short. On the upside, the company forecasts $700 million in revenue for 2021, Dino Ranch is No. 1 among kids in the United States, the Billie Eilish documentary is killing it among teens, and a big-budget, scripted sci-fi production shot on four continents for Apple TV+ is coming soon.

And all it took was for a couple lawyers to wake up from their “coma,” shift gears and show the world that there is more to Canada than Wayne and Shuster.

“It is pretty wild, when you think of our beginnings,” Schneeberg said. “It is mind-blowing.”

Financial Post

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