The Lifetime Achievement Of Chris Blackwell
When maverick record industry mogul Chris Blackwell received a long overdue Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award last year and Vanity Fair named him to its list of "The New Media Establishment," the supreme irony of the accolades could not have been lost on him. Blackwell — mythical figure, living legend, unrepentant iconoclast — remains the rebel savant of the business that made him rich and famous nearly 40 years ago. He is the last of a dying breed that has been genetically supplanted by accountants and button-down, white-collar executives.

Today, motivated by a remarkable new wave of ambition, he is the antithesis of the 21st-century pop culture kingpin. He is a far cry, too, from the norm in the hotel business, which gave him a fresh focus for his creative passions more than a decade ago and yielded an eclectic collection of Island Outpost luxury boutique hideaways where he’d like to live — and often does.

Now, after having turned 71 in June, Blackwell, who discovered via Island Records an astonishingly diverse roster of ground-breaking musical artists such as Bob Marley, U2, and Cat Stevens, and nurtured with Island Outpost a family of unique inns that includes Strawberry Hill, The Caves, Jake’s, and fabled Goldeneye — the former Ian Fleming estate where James Bond was born — in Jamaica, and Pink Sands in the Bahamas, is consumed by a new quest: to become the king of content for the fast-growing DVD market. At the same time, he is developing a luxury residential community at Goldeneye, arguably the most hallowed piece of ground in his beloved adopted homeland, Jamaica.

What accounts for Blackwell’s post-retirement-age hunger, sustained long after lesser titans have abandoned their ambitions for cashed-out stock options and the party circuit? "I’m motivated by the same things I was motivated by at the beginning," he says quietly, in his erudite British-Jamaican accent. "I’m interested in ideas, and I’m interested in trying to make things happen. I try to find people that I’m excited to work with, and I try to help them achieve what they’re trying to achieve."

Were it not for his extraordinary track record as a developer and marketer of raw talent, Blackwell’s sentiment would sound like second-rate PR speak. But given that he earned his way into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame by championing some of the most celebrated recording artists of all time — when no other record label wanted them — his words carry an almost mythical weight.

Instead of chasing hit records, Blackwell invested his time and money in artists he believed in. Over time, much of the rest of the world came to share his taste. When he got into the movie business, instead of looking for a commercial blockbuster that would set box-office records, he released two bona fide, Academy Award-nominated masterpieces: Kiss of the Spider Woman, with William Hurt, and The Trip to Bountiful, starring Geraldine Paige.

In his typically modest way, Blackwell offers an easy explanation for why he has enjoyed such good fortune. "Part of the thing is that as an independent, you’re operating as an independent by necessity," he says. "I was always an outsider, outside the mainstream. It means you can seek out the more interesting, the more unusual types of artists or projects. And in many cases, those are the ones that eventually become huge. But they’re also the ones that don’t appeal to the larger company initially because they don’t fit into any commercial format at the time."

When discussing his past triumphs, Blackwell hastens to point out that the record industry is quite different from when he started in 1959. "When I first got into the record business, there were a lot more independent labels," he says. "Now, they’re all part of a conglomerate. So they serve a different market. And as part of a conglomerate, people are operating not as owners, but as employees, with three-year contracts. So for them, there really isn’t the motivation to sign an artist that might take time to develop and grow because they need to produce success now."

Blackwell, who sold Island Records to Polygram in 1989 for $300 million, has undertaken a new mission to exploit the same fundamental market reality in his battle against the major movie studios for the future of entertainment. He now hopes to make his mark again by nurturing a nonconformist attitude. He has rejected the traditional theatrical feature as his model for the movie business of the 21st century. Instead, he has gambled on DVD — and by the estimates of some media analysts, he is well ahead of the rest of the entertainment world.

"I’m interested in staying ahead of the curve, in music and in technology," Blackwell says. "And I’m very interested in the fact that all these tiny digital cameras exist now. I think there’s going to be an entirely new kind of entertainment made with them. People who are not necessarily trained in film school but still have some ability are going to create, to express themselves. Production costs are reduced because you don’t have to have all the lights and setup to get everything right. So, you’ll get something new and different — not really comparable to a movie. It’s a different kind of entertainment, in a different medium."

As one good example of his Palm Pictures vision, he has launched Palm World Voices, a new series of DVD and CD releases that are innovative multimedia explorations of the imagery, history, and culture of musically rich outposts such as India, the Middle East, Africa, and Brazil. His upcoming DVD feature film releases include Ten Canoes, which for the first time celebrates Aboriginal culture in its native language, and The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, billed as the only Japanese film that "manages to combine explicit sequences of carnal lust with discourses on existentialism and a satire on the Bush administration."

While the movie studios stubbornly stake their survival on a shrinking list of mega-hits that gross at least $100 million at the U.S. box office but often cost at least that much to produce, Blackwell has set his sights on inexpensively-created new age entertainment for an eclectic assortment of niche audiences.

He also sees no real difference between creating DVDs or building his houses at Goldeneye, priced between $650,000 and $8 million. His aesthetic is the same. "To relate the hotel business to the music business," he says, "I think seeing a beautiful piece of land is like hearing a beautiful song. When you hear a beautiful song, you really, really have a responsibility to make a great record of that song, because you’ve got a great piece of material to start with, and you’re essentially building a building on it when you make a record. With a hotel, you start with a beautiful piece of land, but you still need to be totally respectful of that piece of land and what you build."

He pauses to reflect. "That’s what has always driven me," he says. "Money is a by-product. I’ve never been motivated by money. As a matter of fact, on the few occasions where I have said, 'Well, I don’t really like it that much, but it can really make a lot of money’ — on every single occasion, bar none, it has failed."

But when he has been led by his personal passions, he has performed brilliantly. And despite his present ambitions for a new technology, it’s the music that remains his greatest joy. "I’m still very much in the music business," he says with a youthful exuberance that belies his age. "I love music. It’s at the core of everything I do." — John Buchanan, photography by Mark Sullivan/WireImage