THE HOLLYWOOD LEGEND OF JASON BLUM has been told so many times by now that he could sell the IP: how as a struggling young producer he turned Paranormal Activity, the $15,000 found-footage thriller from 2009 that everyone told him was worthless, into a $890 million global theatrical franchise. How he used the spoils to build his production company, Blumhouse, into a horror hit factory that has since made nearly 200 movies and grossed $5.7 billion at the box office. How even as Hollywood’s giants have seen a 90% drop in profits over the last decade, even as streaming platforms have watched their subscriber bases plateau, even as the entire theatrical business—the very idea of going out to see a movie—has become deeply imperiled, Blumhouse’s hits keep coming and coming and coming. Like a serial killer with a machete in one of his movies. There’s your log line.
But there’s another version of Jason Blum’s origin story—more of a prequel, really—and it takes place in 1962, seven years before he was born. It’s a story about Jason’s father, an ascendant young L.A. art dealer named Irving Blum, and it opens with the day he visited the small Upper East Side Manhattan apartment of a kooky weirdo who was painting a ludicrously extensive series of Campbell’s soup cans. Thirty-two of them. No one in the New York art scene liked Andy Warhol. Soup cans? Was this some kind of joke?
On the spot, Blum offered Warhol his first solo show in Los Angeles, but just for the soup cans. All 32 of them, and nothing else.
The Warhol show at Blum’s Ferus Gallery was a big happening in the protean L.A. art scene, and he sold five of the paintings, for $200 each. The actor Dennis Hopper bought one. But before the canvases shipped out, Blum decided he couldn’t bear the thought of the soup cans being split up. Warhol agreed, so Blum set about buying back the canvases. Then once he’d reunited them, he bought all 32 soup cans from Warhol for $1,000, which he paid in $100 increments over 10 months.
Irving Blum turned out to be the only private owner of Warhol’s nowiconic series. In 1996 he sold them into the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, at a steep and generous discount, for $15 million. They’re up there on the walls at MoMA right now, all 32.
Jason Blum knows every detail of this story, every fateful twist and turn in the tale. His
