MOVIE MAN

D Magazine, Sep 01, 2001 by Whitley, Glenna

The Odd Couple

THEY MET IN 1995 AT THE BARNEY GREENgrass restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. Jarchow was in LA looking for investment opportunities. Producer Paul Colichman was looking to start up a new production company and wanted a partner interested in handling the day-to-day business. But the money people Colichman had met were not interested in active management.

"Most of those people aren't looking to do any work at all," Colichman says. "They are looking to meet movie stars and to get dates with young girls." Jarchow seemed more interested in the intricacies of financing a film than having lunch with a starlet.

The two men couldn't have been more different. Quick-minded and sarcastic, Colichman is steeped in the movie business. He grew up in Brentwood (home of O.J. and Monica), started working as an usher in a movie theater at age 12, and by age 16 was booking theaters. By the mid-'90s, Colichman was producing moderately priced films such as Tom & Viv, starring Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson, and One False Move, with Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton.

Quiet and bookish, Jarchow was raised in Wisconsin, earned a law degree and his CPA, and has published five books on real estate syndication and taxation. In 1979, Jarchow moved to Dallas to practice law. In 1981, he went to work for Lincoln Properties, one of the country's largest apartment and office builders. He lived in California for a few years but returned to Dallas in 1987 to work for Bear Steams. During the Dallas real estate depression, he made his mark by orchestrating the purchase of distressed properties, including Thanksgiving Tower and First Interstate Bank Tower.

He left Bear Steams in 1990 to form his own investment firm. Two years later, Jarchow picked up the $12 million Studios at Las Colinas for $1.25 million as a real estate play. Only one movie was filmed there while he and partner Chris Christian owned it, Steve Martin's Leap of Faith, and Jarchow had little to do with the day-to-day operations. But he began buying back catalogs from movie companies in distress. Jarchow also contacted SMU Law School and volunteered to teach a class on entertainment law.

"If you want to learn something, teach it," Jarchow says. "It gives you an excuse to read the cases, to learn about labor unions, the guilds."

Jarchow's friends and ex-wife say he talked about going into the movie business in his early career as a lawyer. Jarchow says he doesn't remember that, but he does recall seeing a James Bond double feature at age 15 and thinking, "How much did this cost? And where did they get the money?"

Jarchow sold his interest in the Studios at Las Colinas to Ross Perot Jr. in 1994 so he could concentrate on negotiating distribution for his growing film inventory. Two years later, Jarchow was finally ready to dive in. He and producer Colichman hit it off immediately. "He understood the business well," Colichman says. "It was hardly impetuous on his part. He was in it for all the right reasons."

In 1996, Jarchow and two investment partners each put up $1 million in equity and formed Regent Entertainment with the goal of financing, producing, and distributing low-budget movies in the $1 to $3 million range. Jarchow arranged a line of credit for the company and they opened an office in Westwood, with Jarchow maintaining a smaller office in Dallas.