The Hollywood Legend of Jason Blum has been told so many times by now that he could sell the IP: how as a struggling young producer he turned Paranormal Activity, the $15,000 found-footage thriller from 2009 that everyone told him was worthless, into a $890 million global theatrical franchise. How he used the spoils to build his production company, Blumhouse, into a horror hit factory that has since made nearly 200 movies and grossed $5.7 billion at the box office. How even as Hollywood’s giants have seen a 90% drop in profits over the last decade, even as streaming platforms have watched their subscriber bases plateau, even as the entire theatrical business—the very idea of going out to see a movie—has become deeply imperiled, Blumhouse’s hits keep coming and coming and coming. Like a serial killer with a machete in one of his movies. There’s your log line.
But there’s another version of Jason Blum’s origin story—more of a prequel, really—and it takes place in 1962, seven years before he was born. It’s a story about Jason’s father, an ascendant young L.A. art dealer named Irving Blum, and it opens with the day he visited the small Upper East Side Manhattan apartment of a kooky weirdo who was painting a ludicrously extensive series of Campbell’s soup cans. Thirty-two of them. No one in the New York art scene liked Andy Warhol. Soup cans? Was this some kind of joke?
