Everton takeover: Dan Friedkin could bring Hollywood with him

Although his background is in cars and planes, prospective Everton owner Dan Friedkin is also a man of the arts and in recent years he has played an increasingly significant role in the movie industry.

The Friedkin Group have now entered into a period of exclusivity with Farhad Moshiri which will allow them time to conduct due diligence on the club and its financial health. People familiar with the matter have told the ECHO that while there is a will on both sides to reach a positive conclusion it is not a deal that is set in stone as things stand. Friedkin is ranked at number 270 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s richest people, and is calculated as having a net worth of $9.2billion (approximately £7.27billion).

Known in some business circles as “Mr Toyota”, Friedkin is CEO and owner of Gulf States Toyota, a position he has held since he was 35 when his then 65-year-old father Tom, who had founded the company in 1969, handed over the reins to him. A third-generation member of a dynasty of aviators, the 59-year-old is a skilled pilot who personally flew both former Everton striker Romelu Lukaku and head coach Jose Mourinho into the Italian capital when they joined Roma but after taking over the family firm from his dad, he has branched out into the film world.

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Friedkin’s principal residence is in Houston, Texas, but given that he was born in southern California, it’s perhaps no surprise that he has a fascination with Tinseltown which has rather more substance than Moshiri’s declaration soon after his own Everton arrival in 2016 that England’s North West region was the new ‘Hollywood’ of football. In 2017, he co-formed 30WEST, providing capital and guidance to creative projects and companies while in the following year Friedkin and 30WEST acquired majority ownership in Neon, a theatrical marketing and distribution company that distributed the Academy Award-winning film Parasite.

The would-be Goodison Park chief is the co-founder and principal at Imperative Entertainment, a studio specialising in the development, production and financing of original and branded entertainment across all platforms focusing on film, television and documentaries. He has been the producer on over a dozen of their films, including The Square (a satirical black comedy); All the Money in the World (a biographical crime thriller directed by Ridley Scott); The Mule (a crime drama directed by Clint Eastwood) and Killers of the Flower Moon (a Western crime drama directed by Martin Scorsese).

Friedkin even moved into the director’s chair himself for the 2019 film The Last Vermeer, an historical drama that tells the story of an art maker who swindles millions of dollars from the Nazis and although you’d do well to recognise him, he appeared in front of the cameras in the film Dunkirk where he acted as an aerial unit co-ordinator, Spitfire pilot and helicopter camera pilot and was recognised with a Taurus Award for Best Speciality Stunt.

Such interests echo the showbusiness background of Everton’s late chairman Bill Kenwright who died in October last year, the month after it was announced that Moshiri had struck a deal with 777 Partners to acquire his 94.1% stake in the club. Starting out as an actor, Kenwright became a theatre impresario and film producer.

Along with his numerous on-stage projects in London’s West End such as Blood Brothers; Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat; Whistle Down the Wind; and Jesus Christ Superstar, he was involved with the following films: Don’t Go Breaking My Heart; Zoe; Die, Mommie, Die!; The Purifiers; Cheri; Broken; My Pure Land; The Fanatic; The Shepherd (as producer) and Stepping Out; The Boys from County Clare; Dixie (as executive producer).