ryan kavanaugh.

Ryan Kavanaugh's office lobby, on the fifth floor of a formerly modern building in West Hollywood, looks like a lot of office lobbies: Under a battered foam ceiling, a receptionist sits behind a high counter, answering a phone that never stops ringing; on either side of her there are some neglected potted plants, dusty in the fluorescent light; in front of her a glass table has been covered with the type and vintage of magazines normally found at a dentist's. The only difference between Ryan Kavanaugh's office lobby and your office lobby is that Ron Howard is sitting in his, in hiking boots, declining politely the receptionist's offer of a bottle of Yosemite water. "I'm A-okay," Howard says. He's come here this afternoon looking for more than something to drink.

The chances are good that Howard has come here, like many of the people who come here, looking for money. For the most part, money has become hard to find in Hollywood, even for men like Ron Howard. Plagued by a combination of rising costs, the credit squeeze, investor flight, digital piracy, the repeal of arcane German tax laws, and too much crap, the usual vaults have gone empty. The Weinsteins have been told by consultants to cut back their slate to ten films a year, New Line has all but disappeared into the maw at Warner Bros., and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, founded in 1924, is on the verge of bankruptcy. No one has any money anymore — no one, it seems, except Ryan Kavanaugh: a thirty-four-year-old onetime venture capitalist and wannabe rock star with messy red hair, a man who refuses to wear anything on his feet but blue Converse All-Stars, even on those rare occasions when he wears a suit. About thirty feet away from the chair presently occupied by Ron Howard, Kavanaugh sits behind a curved zebrawood desk and on top of an estimated $2 billion in liquid assets, much of which comes courtesy of Elliott Associates, a venerable New York — based hedge fund that has $13 billion more where that came from. Which means that if you see a movie sometime in the next twelve months, it's even money that it's been financed at least partly by Kavanaugh through his company, Relativity Media, LLC.

The majority of the movies made by giants Sony and Universal — three quarters of them, in fact — rely on his financing. Warner Bros. has been known to dip into his kitty, and so has Marvel. Atlas Entertainment, where Batman was born, recently struck a coproduction deal with him. Earlier this year, Relativity bought Rogue, Universal's horror imprint, and it will also put out a dozen of its own films — "single pictures," in the local lexicon — next year. All told, Relativity, and thus Ryan Kavanaugh, will produce or coproduce as many as thirty-five movies in 2010.

But what separates Kavanaugh from most producers is not just that he's making movies, it's how he's making movies. Ron Howard has to wait in the office lobby because, at the moment, Kavanaugh is delivering his own pitch to an author who has written a book that a lot of people want to turn into a movie. The author has been making the Hollywood rounds and has spent the last several minutes dropping the names of the famous directors he has met. (Kavanaugh seems unimpressed: He has 10,476 numbers stored on his phone; later, when he goes to the Chateau Marmont for dinner, it takes maybe sixty seconds for Baz Luhrmann to appear out of the foliage and give him a hug.) Kavanaugh counters by telling the author that he, too, knows lots of famous directors — there might even be one waiting in the office lobby — and then he explains to the author why he would be foolish to sell the rights to his book to anyone else. "We might not give you $10 million up front," Kavanaugh says. "But if we tell you we're going to make a movie out of your book, we'll actually make a movie out of your book."