MOVERS & MAKERS
The Producer Bred on Hitchcock and Hepburn, Gillian Bohrer ’96 creates films for a new generation. by LORI FERGUSON
14 I NMH Magazine
Gillian Bohrer ’96 grew up in the tiny town of Erving, Massachusetts, eight miles south of Northfield Mount Hermon and a world away from Hollywood. She was raised on classic Hitchcock and Hepburn movies, but as the new co-president of production at Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, she is equally at home with 21st-century vampire romances and post-apocalyptic science fiction. During the time she was a studio executive at Summit Entertainment and then at Lionsgate, which acquired Summit in 2012, Bohrer oversaw the Twilight and Divergent franchises as well as other films — The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Warm Bodies — that collectively grossed more than $4 billion worldwide. Tapping into the zeitgeist of today’s movie going public might seem an unlikely ambition for someone who came of age without cable TV. But Bohrer says she never felt deprived because her father, a film professor at Fitchburg State, was always bringing movies home. “We were constantly watching American films from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, and for many years, I didn’t realize this was anything unusual. I assumed these were the movies that everyone grew up watching,” Bohrer says. She counts the 1940 hit The Philadelphia Story among her favorites, as well as thrillers from the 1980s and ’90s like The Firm and Seven, which she calls “a shockingly perfect movie.” “And every couple of years I indulge myself in a Hitchcock marathon,” she says. Bohrer’s original career goal for many years was law school. “I was very argumentative as a child,” she says, “and people were always saying, ‘She’s going to be a lawyer!’” She earned a history degree from Yale, and during college, she went to the movies all the time, got involved in theater, and discovered a love of producing plays. As her senior year approached and the time came to apply to law school, Bohrer realized the
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