Lauren Vilchik

An award-winning independent film producer and production attorney, Lauren Moews founded Beverly Hills based Tonic Films in 1999 and at the company's helm has produced six award-winning feature films in the past three years, including "Cabin Fever" which has been nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Horror Film. Moews was nominated for the 2004 Independent Spirit Awards Producer's Award for "outstanding achievement for a body of work" by the IFP. Moews recently acquired DEATH ANGEL'S SHADOW, a collection of three short stories which features famed fantasy author Karl Edward Wagner's immortal anti-hero KANE. Moews will produce a film based upon "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul," which is the first of three short stories comprising DEATH ANGEL'S SHADOW. The other two short stories, "Cold Light" and "Mirage," are waiting in the wings to be developed into a possible KANE franchise for Tonic Films. The sale of "Cabin Fever" at the 2002 Toronto Film Market generated a bidding war between studio distributors resulting in "By far the largest deal of the Toronto Int'l Film Festival." (source Daily Variety Sept 16, 2002) "Cabin Fever," (budget $1.5 million) which went on to gross $22 million domestically and $6 million internationally, has also been a huge DVD and home video hit. Tonic Films is already hard at work spearheading the development of a sequel with writer / director Eli Roth and Lions Gate. According to William Morris Independent's Cassian Elwes, the Filmmakers have "got themselves a potential franchise." Moews'other films include: "Amy's Orgasm" a.k.a. "Amy's O," a romantic comedy theatrically released in August 2002 by the independent film channel, and aired on The Movie Channel, Showtime and the Sundance Channel in 2003. "Amy's O" won the "Audience Choice" Award at both the Santa Barbara Film Festival and the Long Beach Film Festival in 2001, and is currently available at Blockbuster on DVD and video; and "Briar Patch," a dark Southern gothic drama that premiered at the 2003 Slamdance Film Festival where it received a Grand Jury Prize nomination. A respected, knowledgeable and successful "hands on" producer with a wry sense of humor, Moews has received numerous invitations from film schools, film festivals and film markets and attended as a mentor, speaker or panelist including the prestigious: AFI Fest's Kodak Connect 2003, the IFP Independent Producer Series Panel "Running the Set" 2003, Santa Barbara International Film Festival's "Movers & Shakers" Producers Panel, and the IFP's "Foreign and Domestic Incentives for the Independent" panel at the March 2004 American Film Market, among others.