Mark C. Johnson
Producer
Gran Via Productions
Mark Johnson won the Best Picture Academy Award for Barry Levinson's poignant 1988 drama Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman (Best Actor Oscar) and Tom Cruise. One of several films Johnson made with Levinson during a twelve-year span; the movie (winner of four Oscars) also captured a Golden Globe as Best Picture.
Johnson most recently produced the highly anticipated The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a co-production between Walden Media and The Walt Disney Company that opened nationwide in December and a family film, released this past summer, for Walden Media and New Line Cinema called How To Eat Fried Worms based on Thomas Rockwell's beloved book.
Born in Maryland, Johnson spent ten years of his youth in Spain. He earned his undergraduate degree in drama from the University of Virginia and his M.A. in Film Scholarship from the University of Iowa. From there, he moved to New York and entered the Director's Guild Training Program, where one of his first projects was Paul Mazursky's touching autobiographical drama, Next Stop, Greenwich Village. He subsequently relocated to Los Angeles and moved up from production assistant to assistant director on such projects as Movie, Movie, The Brinks Job, Escape from Alcatraz and Mel Brooks' High Anxiety, which was co-written by future business partner Barry Levinson.
In his successful partnership with Levinson, Johnson produced all of the writer-director's films from 1982-1994. In addition to Rain Man, their diverse slate of acclaimed features includes Good Morning, Vietnam, The Natural, Tin Men, Toys, Young Sherlock Holmes, Avalon, Diner (their 1982 debut project, for which Levinson earned an Oscar nomination for his screenplay), and Bugsy, nominated for ten Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. Bugsy also captured a Best Picture Golden Globe Award.
In 1994, Johnson established his own independent production company and won the Los Angeles Film Critics New Generation Award for his very first effort — A Little Princess, directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Johnson, under his new banner, also produced the comedy Home Fries with Drew Barrymore, and the dramatic thriller Donnie Brasco, starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. He served as executive producer for CBS-TV's "L.A. Doctors" and "Falcone," and also executive produced the hit CBS drama, "The Guardian." Johnson's latest television project is an hour-long dramedy, "Love Monkey" which premiered midseason on CBS and had a complete run on VH1 last spring.
Johnson's recent slate of motion pictures includes The Alamo and The Rookie, both directed by John Lee Hancock; director Bob Dolman's The Banger Sisters, with Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn; Brad Silberling's drama, Moonlight Mile, with Sarandon and Dustin Hoffman; Tom Shadyac's supernatural thriller, Dragonfly with Kevin Costner and Kathy Bates; Levinson's Irish satire, An Everlasting Piece; Robert Zemeckis' spooky thriller What Lies Beneath, starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer; the hit comedy Galaxy Quest with Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver; and My Dog Skip, the acclaimed family drama (co-produced with John Lee Hancock) starring Frankie Muniz, Diane Lane and Kevin Bacon.
Johnson recently produced Nick Cassavetes' drama, The Notebook, based on Nicholas Sparks' bestseller and The Wendell Baker Story, which marked the directorial debuts of filmmaking brothers Luke and Andrew Wilson. He is currently in preproduction on Prince Caspian, the sequel to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and, in production on a film for The Weinstein Company starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard entitled Spring Break in Bosnia and an independent movie currently filming in Richmond called Lake City.
Additionally, Johnson has either presented or executive produced Luis Llosa's directorial debut, Sniper, Tim Robbins' directorial debut, Bob Roberts, Steven Soderbergh's Kafka, Robert Redford's Oscar-nominated Quiz Show and Journey of Hope, winner of the 1999 Foreign Language Film Oscar. Johnson also serves as the Chair of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Foreign Language Film Award Committee and as a Governor for the Producers' Branch.