Ellen Goldsmith-Vein

Staying Animated and Ahead of the Curve Founder and CEO of the Gotham Group

ELLEN Goldsmith-Vein has been ignoring her competition for more than 30 years. In 1993, the now 60-year-old entrepreneur launched the Gotham Group with a focus on animation—an area of the entertainment industry she says no one wanted to touch. But having been raised on The Flintstones and The Jetsons, she saw potential in a medium she loved. Plus, she stood up the L.A. office for the Toronto-based animation company Nelvana, so she knew the industry.

Her bet paid off. With credits including The Spiderwick Chronicles, the Maze Runner trilogy, and the recent Disney+ hit show Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Gotham Group has established itself—growing its annual revenue 20 percent each year, save for strike-affected years—as one of Hollywood’s major management-production companies. It’s also the only one of its size owned by a woman.

“We just sort of chugged along,” says Goldsmith-Vein. “We stayed focused on what we were good at.” But even that evolved.

Gotham started out representing animation talent and eventually expanded into film and television production, which included, uncharacteristically, live-action projects. People told her: “You’re just the animation lady. That’s never going to happen.”

During the late 1990s, Goldsmith-Vein found a side door. While other management companies represented authors, the Gotham Group went after publishing houses, which held rich catalogs of IP, and signed Simon & Schuster. To date, the company has represented five of the seven major publishing houses.

Still, to steer a company for more than three decades, Goldsmith-Vein says founders have to learn how to lose business—and not stew in the upset. “There’s always going to be a new, incredibly talented writer, director, artist. There’s always going to be another great story,” she explains. “It’s just about who gets there first.”