In the unpredictable world of Hollywood, there are few safe bets. One of them, though, is that the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills will do good business out of Stewart Till. On his most recent trip to Los Angeles last month, the Four Seasons staff "congratulated" him on his 60th visit. Around the time he books in for his 100th stay, Till calculates that his new business should just about have broken even.

Signpost, the film production and distribution company he has launched with the backing of the Hollywood producer Chuck Roven and a Canadian investment group, is aiming to straddle London and Los Angeles. Till will live in Henley, where he and his wife have converted a giant old people's home into their private residence. London will be the movie distribution hub. He will spend about a week a month in Los Angeles, where Signpost's head of production will be based.

On the face of it, then, Till looks as though he is following the gospel set down by the UK's most successful independent producers, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner at Working Title. The Bevan-Fellner law of UK movie economics is to harness the studio power of Hollywood to drive British film projects. (The Working Title engine is Universal Studios.)

But if Till is a copycat, he is copying an older model: Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Till was number two to Michael Kuhn at Polygram during the glory days of the mini-studio which was involved in making, marketing and distributing such box-office hits as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bean.

As the legend now goes, Polygram owed its success to having a foot in both camps - it produced movies and also controlled their distribution, thereby hanging on to more of the money. Polygram had distribution operations in the 14 most important movie markets in the world, including the US. When it found the right product and marketed it right, it could reach 80 per cent of the global movie market.

After Seagram, the Canadian group, bought the Polygram movie and music business in 1998, it gradually suffocated the film division, leaving little more than a video sales business.

Just over two years ago, Till and his fellow executives traipsed into the Cobden Working Men's Club in west London to toast Polygram's successes farewell. After that, having scouted around for other jobs and toyed with a couple of directorships, he has been working on Polygram, The Sequel.

In January 2000, he went to LA and started telling people that he wanted to "relaunch Polygram". Eighteen months later, he set up Signpost.

"What I am trying to do is fill the gap left by Polygram - a company which makes films in the US and the UK and can distribute them ourselves," Till says. Signpost will make movies on budgets up to $60m-$70m.

Roven's company, Mosaic Media, has put in some of the equity. CDP Capital, a Montreal-based fund management group, is the largest shareholder, having put in the bulk of the funds.

Till has recruited an old Polygram hand from Canada, Darryl Iwai, to be head of distribution in London. Lynwood Spinks will be head of business affairs in LA. And he is in the process of appointing a head of production, also to be based in Los Angeles. He has already signed up a couple of Hollywood

producers for first-look deals: Roven is one, Larry Gordon, who has been involved in movies from Die Hard to Boogie Nights, is another.

Signpost has embarked on its first film project, Bulletproof Monk, a $55m movie which would star Chow Yun-Fat of Crouching Tiger fame. The next step is to start building what Polygram used to call "Opcos": the operating companies which do the distribution drudgery.

Till plans to start in two countries, but has yet to choose from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, the UK and Australia. If Signpost could be distributing in more countries, it would be into a virtuous circle. It could reap more from its successes, attract better projects and reap more from those.

As things stand, Till reckons Signpost will break even over the five years of the business plan. If the company could distribute more movies in more countries, it would be a more powerful entity and able to grow a bigger asset value more quickly.

To do that, though, it needs more money.Polygram, according to people who should know, needed $600m to build its worldwide distribution business - not just to open the offices and staff them, but also to buy rights.

One of the differences between Signpost and Polygram is that Till's new business does not have ambitions in US distribution. Miramax, which has also taken a small shareholding in the company, has signed a US distribution deal for Signpost pictures. Apart from the fact that he does not have the money to build a distribution business from scratch in the US, the Signpost argument is that international is where the money is - and is going to be.

Today, about 65 per cent of the world film market sits outside the US. Till calculates that within the next 10 years, that could increase to 75-80 per cent. The recent turbulence in the European TV rights market and the resilience of the US box office are beginning to make some people question that conventional wisdom. Either way, the international market is big and, over time, set to get bigger.

Still, even stripping out the US, film distribution executives calculate that building up a distribution network with the global scale to enjoy the clout Polygram once had would require $400m. Till is certainly willing to take in more investment. He currently aims to work on four or five films a year, but would like to increase that to eight or nine. He is in the lucky position that he has the track record to attract money.

He was born in Essex to a conservative middle- class family - his father was a civil servant, his mother a teacher and he went to Dulwich College. Since then, he has had a conventional, anti-establishment career: first advertising, then video sales and then the international movie distribution business. As the former president of Universal Pictures International and the man who ran Polygram's international business, Till has a reputation in the distribution and marketing of movies.

His thinking is that, to get access to great product, you have to show that you can control some of the distribution, get the release date of the film right and that you know how to market it.

"Polygram was known for marketing films really well," he says. "If you market a film well you can add 30 per cent to its revenue, but marketing can also knock 30 per cent off the revenue too."

Till, a straight-talker with a blokey style that is refreshing in the sometimes affected, over-polished world of the movie executive, is candid about his reasons for wanting to make a go of Signpost. "I believe in the business proposition," he says, but more tellingly adds: "There was a mixture of frustration at being number two to Michael [Kuhn] and Polygram being cut off in its prime.

"I am driven by the wish to show that the model is the right one and that I can run the company."

"Michael", meanwhile, has set up his own thing: Kuhn & Co. Partly because he did not have the inclination to rebuild a global distribution business and partly because he did not have the money, Kuhn's approach has been to put together the funds to create a film production and finance business.

Kuhn & Co aims to fill the gap in the UK for making bigger-budget movies. It has a distribution deal with Twentieth Century Fox for 60 per cent of the world. The films Kuhn finances, it sells on to the other 40 per cent. (The company's first big project, The Sin-Eater starring Heath Ledger, has been bought up by Fox for global release.)

Kuhn expects that over 2001 and 2002 he will have raised roughly E90m in equity, largely through the retail market in Germany. With that chunk of funds as a foundation, he has bank lines to borrow more, project by project. He aims to make about 10 movies over the next two or three years.

"Coming back here and not particularly intending to make movies again, I saw an enormous gap in the market," says Kuhn. "I can be the door in London...for bigger budget movies." Kuhn says he has chosen not to try and copy the Polygram model; among other things, "I do not want to have 1,000 people reporting to me...I have done that." Nor did he have the resources.

His book out in May, 100 Films and a Funeral, will tell some of the story of how Polygram was built up bit by bit. The irony today is that if the UK film industry really wanted to see the recreation of Polygram, it could do worse than watch Till and Kuhn put their businesses together.

Between them, they have raised more money to flow into filmmaking than the BBC, FilmFour, Granada Films and the long line of little independents put together. But, even by the anything-can-happen standards of the movie business, a Till-Kuhn merger would be an outlandish bet.

The "boys from Polygram", as Till calls them, are each doing big things, but separately.

james.harding@ft.com

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