Hugs and condolences to friends and colleagues of Anonymous Content founder and producer Steve Golin, who passed yesterday from cancer at age 64. Obviously way too young, but a life well lived.
How else to describe a guy who produced or significantly assisted Spotlight, The Revenant, Babel, Beasts of No Nation, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, Boy Erased, Being John Malkovich, The Game, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, et. al.?

Only in the 21st Century film industry can you say with a straight face that a departed professional was “burdened with good taste,” but that was Golin for you. Inexorably drawn to quality-level projects, constitutionally incapable of producing crap and always with the reddish complexion, no hair to speak of, squinty eyes and grubby salt-and-pepper whiskers, Golin lugged good taste around like a bent-over mail carrier…like Charles Bukowski in the ’50s. But he never backed off, and producing ambitious, first-rate, critically hailed films was also his pride and levitation.

Steve’s big hallelujah moment happened in early ’16 when Spotlight won the Best Picture Oscar.

I last ran into Steve at the 2015 Middleburg Film Festival, when he was repping and taking bows for The Revenant and Spotlight. We talked for 35 or 40 minutes in a shuttle van between Dulles and Middleburg. He was a hustler, of course, like any good producer, but he seemed to really understand and believe in the transformative power of great filmmaking.

The film industry could use a lot more Steve Golins, and now it has one less.