Early life and education

Megan Ellison was born in Santa Clara County, California, the daughter of billionaire Oracle Corporation chairman Larry Ellison and his ex-wife, Barbara Boothe Ellison. She has one brother, film producer David Ellison. Ellison graduated from Sacred Heart Preparatory in 2004 and attended film school at the University of Southern California for one year.

Career

Ellison started out in the film business in 2006 when she contacted Katherine Brooks, the writer and director of Loving Annabelle, about investing in the filmmaker's next movie. The duo made plans for Waking Madison, starring Elisabeth Shue, which told the story of a woman who tries to cure her multiple personality disorder by locking herself in a room without food for 30 days. Ellison financed the film that was reported to have a budget of $2 million. Principal photography took place in 2007. It screened at the Newport Beach Film Festival in 2011 and went straight to DVD in July of that year.

Ellison provided some financing for more movies in 2008 and 2009. The first was Main Street starring Colin Firth. It received little attention at film festivals and failed to gain general release. Passion Play, also made in 2009, got a release but fared poorly at the box office despite a well-known cast of popular actors. However, her investment in the Coen brothers western remake True Grit paid off as that movie found major commercial and critical success when released at the end of 2010.

After that, Ellison received access to much larger sums of money from her father for the production of more movies and partnered with Michael Benaroya to produce and cofinance the thriller Catch .44 starring Bruce Willis and Forest Whitaker, and John Hillcoat's Prohibition-era crime drama, Lawless. Around that same time, she began to collaborate with the Creative Artists Agency's film finance group headed by Roeg Sutherland and Micah Green.

She has since founded Annapurna Pictures, a company that plans to take a so-called "Silicon Valley" approach to filmmaking by investing in original, daring movies made by prestigious directors and screenwriters. Believing that risk-averse Hollywood studios have largely abandoned sophisticated dramas, period pieces, and auteur cinema, Annapurna Productions has released Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, a period drama about a cult that resembles Scientology, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Zero Dark Thirty, an action-thriller about the killing of Osama bin Laden from writer Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow, who made the Oscar-winning movie, The Hurt Locker.

Ellison is developing a film based on "The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest", an article about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange by the departing executive editor of The New York Times, Bill Keller.

In 2011, Ellison outbid Lionsgate for the rights to the Terminator franchise. In January 2014, Ellison removed Annapurna Productions from the reboot of the Terminator franchise.

In 2014, Ellison became the first woman and the fourth person to receive two best picture Academy Award nominations in the same year, which she received for her work on Her and American Hustle. In June 2014, Ellison optioned the screen rights for the memoir A House in the Sky, which tells the story of Amanda Lindhout and her capture by Somali rebels during 2011.

Also in 2014, Ellison was included as part of the Advocate's annual "40 Under 40" list.

Personal life

Ellison is openly lesbian. Ellison’s company is called Annapurna, after the famous Himalayan circuit she hiked in Nepal in 2006. Ellison has raced speedboats and participated in sailing races, and was a competitive equestrian as well.

Filmography

As producer

Year	Film	Director	Other notes
2010	Waking Madison	Katherine Brooks
	Main Street	John Doyle
	Passion Play	Mitch Glazer	executive producer
	True Grit	Joel and Ethan Coen	executive producer
2011	Catch .44	Aaron Harvey
2012	Lawless	John Hillcoat
	The Master	Paul Thomas Anderson	Nominated—Gotham Award for Best Feature
	Zero Dark Thirty	Kathryn Bigelow	Nominated—Academy Award for Best Picture Nominated—AACTA Award for Best Film Nominated—BAFTA Award for Best Film Nominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama Nominated—Producers Guild of America Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture
	Killing Them Softly	Andrew Dominik	Credited as Executive Producer
	Spring Breakers	Harmony Korine	Credited as Executive Producer
	The Grandmaster	Wong Kar-wai	Credited as Executive Producer
2013	Her	Spike Jonze	Nominated—Academy Award for Best Picture Nominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Nominated—Producers Guild of America Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture
	American Hustle	David O. Russell	Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy Nominated—Academy Award for Best Picture Nominated—BAFTA Award for Best Film Nominated—AACTA International Award for Best Film Nominated—Producers Guild of America Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture
2014	Foxcatcher	Bennett Miller
2015	Terminator Genisys	Alan Taylor	executive producer
	Joy	David O. Russell
2016
	Wiener-Dog	Todd Solondz
	Everybody Wants Some!!	Richard Linklater
	Sausage Party	Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan
	The Bad Batch	Ana Lily Amirpour	In post-production

[ Source: Wikipedia ]