No matter where the traditional borders of Hollywood sit, filmmaking today is a global conceit, and America’s films—whether adored or condemned, imitated or illegally reproduced—have become even more of a cultural flashpoint for the rest of the world. As a result, Hollywood productions are tending toward one of two distinct directions—either huge, special-effects-laden blockbusters with international appeal, or smaller films designed to have maximum domestic appeal.

Portfolio.com talked to those film executives who are helping shape both ends of this spectrum, from the visionary producer of Juno, who’s breaking all the indie rules, to the audacious new head of Marvel Studios, who’s determined to own the summer season.

J.J. Abrams: The Creator
Title: Chairman, Bad Robot
Notable projects: TV series Alias, Felicity, and Lost, co-creator and producer; films Mission: Impossible III, director, and Cloverfield, producer
Years in business: 18

J.J. Abrams has long been known as Hollywood’s boy wonder, the storytelling wizard behind the hit television series Alias, Felicity, and Lost. But the surprise success of his production company’s first major film, Cloverfield, has marked the wunderkind’s arrival as a significant Hollywood heavyweight, with talk of “the next Steven Spielberg” and “the next Dreamworks” being bandied about.

“We have big dreams, and we have some pretty cool things in the works,” Abrams says. “People say I’m going to start my own Imagine or Dreamworks, but it’s always strange to me talking about a company in that way, modeling it after other companies.” His current project is a new Star Trek movie, which Bad Robot is producing for Paramount and for which Abrams is director and producer.

Abrams proved his big-screen mettle directing Tom Cruise in the 2006 film Mission: Impossible III, which grossed $395 million worldwide; and while the success of that film might have signaled his obvious transition to directing, Abrams launched Bad Robot last year with the bigger aim of shepherding his own projects.

“The idea is to take the various lessons I’ve been lucky enough to learn in television and apply them to feature-film making and do movies that have all the ambition, but not necessarily the excess, that some movies have,” the 41-year-old explains.

Cloverfield was produced by Abrams’ Bad Robot for $25 million, and it set box office records in January with a $41 million opening weekend and a $12,000 per-screen average, amassing $146 million after fewer than five weeks in wide release. But despite its mainstream success, the unusual monster-disaster movie was an experimental effort in almost every way. Abrams hired a relative unknown, Matt Reeves, to direct the film, which was shot handheld from a “scriptment,” an outline around which dialogue was improvised. The project was also made on a risky, midsize budget. Studios prefer to green-light massive movies or very small films; anything in between is seen as lost money.

But Abrams says Cloverfield is exactly the type of mid-budget, surprise blockbuster that his production company hopes to do more of in the future, as well as producing the occasional big-budget tent-pole movie.

Abrams’ current project, the latest installment in the Star Trek franchise, is due in May 2009 and, with a $150 million budget, is the biggest film he’s taken on yet. But the size of the film hasn’t changed the way he works.

“When a movie is a $130 to $150 or $160 million movie, it sounds like the champagne is flowing, but the truth is you still need to treat that every day as if you were making a movie that cost 10 times less than that,” Abrams says.

Given his larger goals for Bad Robot and his gee-whiz sense of storytelling, the Steven Spielberg comparison is a natural. But it’s a description Abrams calls preposterous.

Says Abrams, “I guess anyone who hears that has just been talking to my mom.”

Photograph by: CNBC

Richard Taylor: The Effects Wizard
Title: CEO, Weta Workshop
Notable projects: King Kong, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Night at the Museum, X-Men: The Last Stand
Years in business: 20+

If you pit thousands of Orcs against thousands of Storm Troopers, who wins? If you’re talking special effects, it’s the Orcs. The evil foot soldiers of the Lord of the Rings trilogy have marched special-effects expert Richard Taylor to the top of the line of cinematic technicians, where he’s shoved George Lucas and his Industrial Light and Magic from their long-entrenched position.

James Cameron helped. The Oscar-winning director tapped Taylor and his New Zealand-based Weta Workshop to work on his latest blockbuster-in-the-making, the $200-million-budget sci-fi epic Avatar, to be released next year. In choosing Weta, Cameron effectively jilted his collaborator on Titanic and Terminator 2, and called Weta a “leader in visionary effects.”

Taylor has won five Oscars and four Bafta awards, and since the release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Taylor has continued to pile up the successes, creating the effects for Night at the Museum, which rang up $251 million in global ticket sales, and X-Men: The Last Stand, which grossed $234 million worldwide. The Lord of the Rings trilogy took in close to $3 billion in ticket sales in all. His company’s other big project right now is the upcoming remake of the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still for Fox, likely due out at the end of 2008.

Taylor started his effects shop in the back room of his Wellington apartment in 1987. He later collaborated with Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, a fellow Kiwi, on the cult hit Heavenly Creatures before the pair formed a partnership to expand the effects shop, calling it Weta after a species of large New Zealand bug. A company that had only a handful of workers in the late eighties, Weta now employs a staff of more than 500, all creating the latest advances in effects-making art. Success is good, but Taylor says it has not made him complacent.

“We cannot rest on our laurels,” he told the New Zealand Press Association after nabbing the Oscar for best visual effects for King Kong in 2006. “Weta has to compete for the work like every freelance company, put in a cost-effective bid, and do an incredibly high-quality job to...demonstrate we are worthy of the next job.”

Photograph by: Getty Images

Lianne Halfon: The Producer
Title: Producer, Mr. Mudd
Notable projects: Crumb (1994); Ghost World (2001); Juno (2007)
Years in the industry: 20+
 
Juno, this season’s surprise hit and an Oscar nominee for Best Picture, could easily have turned into just another teen comedy. But Lianne Halfon, the film’s producer, stuck to her vision of preserving the “in-between” nature of the film’s titular character, neither loser nor popular girl, and playing up screenwriter Diablo Cody’s original voice. Halfon even convinced the film’s studio, Mandate Pictures, to delay the film’s release until every last quirky detail was right. The results have been spectacular: The underdog contender has racked up an eye-popping $153 million in ticket sales so far on a meager budget of $7.5 million, making it the most profitable picture Hollywood has seen since My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It’s not simply a successful indie, it’s a bona fide blockbuster. No matter who wins on Oscar day, Juno will have prevailed by perhaps the industry’s most obsessive measure: the box office.
 
“Studios often see teenagers as a much more homogenous group,” Halfon says from her offices at Mr. Mudd, her production company in Los Angeles. “But that marketplace is as diverse as any other demographic. The teenager who is neither the mean girl nor the shy girl, but that in-between girl, has a whole other set of preoccupations.”

As Halfon’s choices make clear, Juno is a bottom-up, artist-driven movie, and her success puts her at the forefront of a new movement of films that draw upon characters who do not sit at either end of the typical Hollywood extreme of queen bee or outcast, who by their very depth can attract a wider viewership. Halfon’s instinct with Juno was to highlight the main character’s sensitivity while still maintaining that sharp-tongued discourse so favored among the teen set, a move that clearly paid off. While the movie has only been out for a few months, it’s safe to say that other Hollywood studios are looking to develop their own vehicles focused on this market.

“All the studios want to do another Juno,” Halfon explains. “But the thing that’s difficult for them to understand is what’s responsible for that kind of success. Those elements are harder to identify from the outside.”
 
Halfon, who started working as a script reader for Columbia Tri-Star in the eighties, eventually went on to found production company Mr. Mudd in 1998, with partners John Malkovich and Russ Smith, where she produced the cult hit Ghost World. Her next project, Lawyerland, based on a novel about Manhattan lawyers, begins shooting later this year. Though Halfon is a Hollywood veteran, she has always focused on idiosyncratic projects with quirky, honest voices, and her success with Juno is now allowing her to apply that vision to bigger projects.
 
Of her recent success she says, “Maybe it’s partly an experience thing of knowing when to fight for things, but at the same time, I think things in this industry are changing.”

Photograph by: Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

David Maisel: The Studio Head
Title: Chairman, Marvel Studios
Notable projects: Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, both due out later this year.
Years in the industry: 14
 
When David Maisel became the chairman of Marvel Studios back in March, the first thing he did was to line up a financing deal with Merrill Lynch for $525 million, giving his studio the power to produce mega-budget films all by itself and instantly creating a rival to studios like Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox. After all, as C.O.O. of parent company Marvel Entertainment prior to ascending to the top spot at Marvel Studios, Maisel had seen firsthand with the Spider-Man franchise how not being able to produce its own films left the studio out in the cold when it came to the lion’s share of the profits—the three Spider-Man films have grossed close to $2.5 billion for Sony Pictures, while Marvel’s licensing fee was likely well under $100 million.

“It was very much my passion when coming in that we had to get control of green light,” Maisel explains over the phone from his Beverly Hills office. “So now we’re only focused on that part of the industry—the $100-million-plus, tent-pole movies.”
 
First up is Iron Man, a $135-million-budget movie due out in May, to be quickly followed in June by the $125 million Incredible Hulk, a new version of the disastrous 2003 film directed by Ang Lee.

Of course, with a greater share of the rewards comes a greater share of the risk should these films fail. Maisel is gambling with budgets that typically only decades-old studios deal with. But he is eager to take risks if it means following his instincts.

With Iron Man, for instance, Maisel had a huge budget and interest from a variety of top stars (including, at one point, Tom Cruise). Though he could have had just about anyone play the title role, he chose Robert Downey Jr., not exactly a safe choice.
 
“I wanted him from the beginning,” Maisel says. “I don’t know if he would have been cast at another studio, but I couldn’t have imagined anyone else in the role.”

Maisel, 46, a Harvard Business School grad, got his start in Hollywood working under Michael Ovitz in 1994 where he learned what he calls, “Hollywood street smarts.” After a few years at Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency and then at the Endeavor agency, Maisel landed at Marvel, where his counterintuitive moviemaking decisions have raised eyebrows. Unlike his one-time boss Ovitz,  whose stint atop Disney was a spectacular failure, Maisel seems to have successfully managed the transition from agent to studio chief.
 
The success of Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk will go a long way toward determining whether he’s able to maintain his perch. As Maisel puts it, “For us at Marvel, we’re going from having a small share of the movie pie to the whole share.”

John Sloss, right, with Harvey Weinstein.
Photograph by: Getty Images

John Sloss: The Sales Agent
Title: Founder, Cinetic Media
Notable projects: I’m Not There (2007), producer; Little Miss Sunshine (2006), sales agent
Years in the industry: 17

Amid the frenzied hum that saturates Sundance every year, there is often one coherent gathering point for all that swirling faith and money—John Sloss’ rented condo. As one of Hollywood’s premier sales agents, the New York-based attorney has represented many must-have indies at Sundance, requiring various studio czars to wait in line in Sloss’ lobby, impatiently biding their time before being allowed to come up to his expansive hilltop suite and make an offer.
 
“Last year at Sundance we had all these distributors in our condo trying to buy three different movies,” Sloss says. “We were up for fifteen hours settling all those deals.”
 
Sloss famously negotiated Sundance’s biggest sale to date: 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine to Fox Searchlight for $10.5 million, a sum that many thought was too high at the time. “We probably could have gotten more money than that,” Sloss says, “but we wanted [Fox] Searchlight.” He explains that Searchlight had excelled in the past in marketing indie comedies such as Napoleon Dynamite and Sideways, a point well proved by Sunshine’s eventual box office take of $96 million. And though some may think that Sloss then perhaps gave up too much in light of that revenue, there were back-end points attached to the deal.
 
“I can’t really talk about the specifics,” Sloss says, but he did say that he and his partners have since made almost twice as much money back as it had gotten from the original sale.  

Sloss, 51, a Michigan native, worked for a number of years as an entertainment lawyer with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in New York before founding his own practice, Sloss Law, in 1993. After cementing his reputation as a shrewd sales agent for independent films, he launched Cinetic as an entertainment consulting firm in 2001. More recently, he created a talent-management arm to Cinetic by bringing on Bart Walker, a manager who represents Sofia Coppola, Julian Schnabel, and Jim Jarmusch, among others.
 
Though this year’s Sundance Festival was softer than previous years in terms of the number of deals made, Sloss’ power will only grow: In a town where reputation is everything, this salesman owns his niche—and he knows it.