The MBA Life June 8, 2009, 11:01AM EST

From Business School to the Backlot

A Kellogg grad is getting ready for the national release of his first movie, but he couldn't have done it without his alumni-investors

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Blame it on the gutter lecture. As an MBA student at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management (Kellogg Full-Time MBA Profile), Marc Fienberg took a public speaking course with a professor named Martin Stoller. The point of the lecture, Fienberg recalls, was that it would take a long time for any Kellogg student to fail so miserably that he or she actually ended up living in the gutter. So why not take risks and follow your dreams while you can?

For Fienberg, that meant passing on lucrative job opportunities and struggling for 12 years to produce an independent film. The big test will come on Aug. 21 when Play the Game, a comedy he wrote and directed starring TV legend Andy Griffith, gets a national release. Getting that far, though, involved more twists and turns than a James Bond film. And Fienberg's Hollywood saga is a lesson in tenacity, crisis management, and fund-raising that no classroom could provide. "I'm still out there raising money today," he says.

After graduating from business school in 1997, Fienberg took a trip to Nepal to recharge and it was there he wrote the script for Play the Game. It's the tale of a young man who teaches his widowed grandfather how to date again. The story was based on Fienberg's own experience with his grandfather. Fienberg entered screenwriting contests to get exposure and endlessly shopped his script to agents. He finally got someone to represent him, but no studio would finance the picture. Along the way Fienberg says he employed a cold-calling strategy that forced him to endure hundreds of rejections. "I'm very persistent," he says. "When I'm just short of annoyance, I stop."

One of those cold calls got him on the phone with Lawrence Kasdan, director of The Big Chill and other films. Kasdan gave him some valuable, if somewhat chilling, advice. "He said: 'Nobody's going to help you. If you're going to do it, you have to do it yourself,' " Fienberg recalls.

So Fienberg started raising the movie money on his own, sending out hundreds of e-mails to Kellogg alumni. The payoff came at a pitch meeting he organized in Chicago in early 2007. One by one, the investors started coming in. Fienberg has raised an estimated $3 million from 15 investors, nearly all of them Northwestern alumni.

Andy Griffith Saves the Day

One of the investors, Chuck Funai, the chief financial officer of Cummins Southern Plains, a diesel engine distributor, says he liked the script and the fact that Fienberg was involving older actors. He also saw this as a way to create a network of Kellogg alumni-investors for future projects. "We're optimistic we'll be doing other things, not just in the film industry," he says. "It's been a real learning curve," adds Jim Rose, the chief executive of marketing firm Mosaic Sales and another Fienberg investor.

With the money in hand, Fienberg's real work began. He called the actor he had lined up to play the grandfather, The Rockford Files star James Garner. But Garner's agent said the star had recently had surgery and wouldn't be able to do the movie. Fienberg says he spent the whole next day in bed, wondering whether he should tell his investors that the star they were betting on was now out of the picture. He called them and offered to return their money. Surprisingly, none of them backed out.

Fienberg had a date to start shooting, but no star. A successful Hollywood producer who had been mentoring him said Fienberg should cancel the shoot, and that producing the picture without a star would doom the project. Fienberg kept sending his script out to other actors. Three weeks before filming was scheduled to begin, Fienberg got a phone call from Andy Griffith.