It sounds like a Cinderella story: Kitchener-Waterloo boy heads south, follows his heart to Hollywood, lands a grunt job and winds up running an Oscar-winning actor’s production company.

That’s pretty much how life unfolded for Norman Golightly after he left Kitchener’s Forest Heights Collegiate for the University of Pennsylvania, where a part-time drama hobby quickly led to full-on career path to Los Angeles.

By 1997, Golightly was working alongside Nicolas Cage, forging a business relationship that would last a dozen years before he stopped to take stock of his fruitful but frantic life as a Hollywood insider.

“I didn’t know how exhausting it was until I stopped, and I didn’t know where my late 20s had gone, where my 30s had gone,” Golightly told me during a recent visit to the Communitech Hub.

And so, after leading production of such films as World Trade Center, Ghost Rider, Knowing and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, he got about as far from Hollywood as he could get. Golightly travelled to rural Kenya, where he found the Cura Rotary Home, an orphanage where more than 50 young people faced life on their own after their parents had died from HIV/AIDS .

He shared his passion for photography with the kids, for whom he collected donated digital cameras. Their artwork has helped raise awareness of AIDS orphans as well as fund improvements at the orphanage and a self-sustaining agricultural program in its vicinity.

Now back in Los Angeles, Golightly is returning to what he knows – entertainment production – but with a focus on socially conscious projects with potential to improve people’s lives.

On a recent visit to Kitchener, Golightly took a tour of the Communitech Hub and met with startup entrepreneurs to share insights into working in Hollywood.

In return, he came away with a new appreciation for his old hometown, and the potential it might hold for his own next act, as we discussed in a brief interview.

Q – What are you working on?

A – I am in the very early phases of starting a socially minded production company.

This is not the verified tagline yet, but it’s ‘content that matters’; entertaining commercial theatrical releases, primarily. It could be TV as well; it could be web-based stuff.

I’m a big music fan, so I think it could even be music content - just stuff that sort of raises the bar and is a catalyst for discussion.

Having been in the film business for nearly two decades, it’s a reminder and a realization of the power of these mediums, and how they reach the world. Not necessarily change the world, but make people think, and use those powers for good.

Q – Connect the dots for me between you attending Forest Heights Collegiate in Kitchener and running Nicolas Cage’s production company.

A – It’s interesting. It actually makes complete sense, but you wouldn’t necessarily have been able to predict it.

So, I went to Forest Heights and had a great time there. I spent part of my spare time doing theatre there, acting and directing a bit.

Then I went off to the University of Pennsylvania and did their undergraduate business program at the Wharton School of Economics, because I thought I wanted to grow up and be a big fancy businessman on Wall Street.

Then I realized who I was in class with when I got there and . . . great people, but I knew we were not exactly cut of the same cloth.

I started spending a lot of spare time doing theatre at Penn. I found a comedy troupe in my freshman year that was Penn’s equivalent to Harvard’s Hasty Pudding, which is a fairly well-known comedy thing.

This group, called the Mask and Wig Club, had been around over 100 years; it was an all-male comedy troupe à la Monty Python. Guys would dress up in drag, as necessary, to portray female characters.

And, at a school like Penn, where athletics weren’t that important, theatre was a big deal, and this was sort of a cool group to be in.

I got in as a freshman and started acting, writing and directing, and I loved it.

With the juxtaposition of doing that stuff, and liking my business classes but not necessarily seeing myself as the same as my peers, I thought, ‘Well, show business; I don’t know anything about it, but that sounds like a crossroads of this creative side I have and this business mind I have.’

So, I started spending my summers out in Los Angeles, interning for producers while I was still in college. I got my feet wet.

I didn’t learn that much, but my appetite was certainly whet, and I said, ‘Okay, that’s where I’m going after I graduate. There’s something for me out there.’

My mentors out in LA from those summers had said the best first-job experience is to go and work in a big agency. The agencies are the centre of Hollywood; everything flows through to them and out of them; it’s a great place to learn.

So I went and worked for Creative Artists Agency, CAA, as an assistant, which was 18 hours a day, barely minimum wage if it was that, and I don’t think there was overtime. I was a glorified secretary, but that’s sort of the entry rung on the ladder of Hollywood, and it sure was a great learning experience.

I ended up working for a very senior talent agent there, and learned a lot about the business – including that I didn’t want to be an agent.

One of the great lessons I learned quickly was that I wanted to be a little closer to creating the content and not just making the deals for the talent.

One of the weird turns in my career journey was that, while still an assistant, I had circulated some of the writing I had done for that college sketch group, and one of the TV agents at CAA said, ‘Hey, you can actually write. We should try to get you a job as a writer.’

So, I was sort of a client while I was still an assistant there, and that was very exciting at the age of 21, so I quit my job and said ‘I’m going to be a writer.’

And then I just hung out in coffee shops and I didn’t really write. I looked like a writer, but I wasn’t doing a lot of writing.

I got a few small paying gigs, but it’s sort of not what I was cut out for, and I missed having a day job, so in a great stroke of luck I ended up being introduced to Ben Stiller, who was one of my comedy idols.

This was back in the mid-90s; he was still primarily a director and he’d had a TV show on MTV, but he wasn’t a household name yet.

But I was well aware of him, and liked his sort of Generation X brand of comedy, and he hired me as a creative assistant. So, I was a sounding board to pitch ideas; I would edit scripts with him; I would review scripts that would come in for him as offers.

He actually got me a job at HBO writing a script that he was going to direct, based on a book Bill Maher had written.

So, I had a great little run with him; it was only about a year and a half that we were together, but it was really exciting to be with someone who was a creative inspiration, and collaborating with him on that level.

And then I was introduced to Nicolas Cage’s partner, whom he had started Saturn with. Again, it was a time in Nic’s life when his career was just exploding, with an Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas, and then turning into an action hero extremely successfully.

He was sort of walking both sides of the commerce and art of Hollywood, and he was given a production company deal for Saturn Films at Disney, and then he just hired some people and brought me in as the Number 2 person, leaving off the Ben job.

And it was a great opportunity, because I also admired Nic as an actor, and he did kind of everything. He would do drama, he would do action, he would do comedy, so it was a wide-open canvas to develop projects for somebody I really respected.

I was 25 when I got that job, and then I think about three years into that, my boss’s partner had left, and after a sort of lengthy audition process, I got the job as being his partner and the president of the company.

So, in the whole run, I worked with him for 12 years, from age 25 to 37.

Q – How old are you now?


A – I just turned 40.

I was on a cruise a number of years ago, making chat with an old guy at the buffet. I said, ‘Hey, how you doin’ today?’ and he said, ‘Well, I woke up again.’

It was one of my favourite answers.

Q – Describe for me the Kitchener you’ve seen on this trip compared to the Kitchener you left.

A – Having lived here up until 1990 – I graduated Forest Heights in ’90, and I went to Queensmount [Senior Public School), so I was living in that section of the city – of course, I was a high school student, so I wasn’t hyper-aware of everything that was going on in Kitchener.

But, to me, Kitchener was an industrial place. A lot of my friends’ families worked at Schneider’s; I think Frito-Lay was here at the time, maybe Labatt’s was here. Not necessarily that they were blue-collar workers; some of them were, but they worked around those industries.

It was sort of like the Pittsburgh of Canada to me. We weren’t a steel town, but we were an industry town of physical labour, and that was my impression of Kitchener growing up here. I’ll keep Waterloo out of it, because to me that was still Kitchener but slightly different.

And I really didn’t come back for a long time. My only family, really, is my mother, and she still lives here. I would visit her, and she would more often come to see me; that’s why I wasn’t coming back that often.

And on my visits to come here, I didn’t really notice the changes, because they’re a little bit under the surface. If I’m just driving by the Tannery, it still looks like the Tannery to me, so I don’t really know, nor would I think to ask, ‘Hey, what’s going on inside the Tannery these days?’

Q – Aside from the Google sign on top, that is.

A – Yeah, exactly.

So, until Bil Ioannidis reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, you should see what’s happening in your hometown' – I mean, of course I knew about RIM; I would hear about it through friends.

I would say, ‘God Bless Facebook’ because so many of these connections are a result of that; I mean, people that I never would have thought to look up I’m now friends with again, and that’s been great, so I see what’s going on with people.

And of course I think RIM has been a tremendous part of the success story of this region, and it seems like a lot of opportunity is going to come out of that, because you have these great minds – young, energetic people – figuring out what’s next, and a lot of them are here doing it.

I went to a place very much like Communitech in LA two weeks ago, and I’ve got to say, this place is 100 times better.

I don’t want to name the place in LA; it’s a fine operation, and it was one of my first exposures to something like that. And they were also talking about startups and office space and the networking around the common tables and the fridge and the open work areas, all of that.

But this is just done at such an extreme level, and also with the incubator factor and the accelerator factor, which wasn’t present there – and the fact that you have real, established companies adjacent. You have a Google here, you have a RIM here, it’s not just kind of a startup facility unto itself at the end of town. It’s in the middle of it.

And it’s really exciting to see that, and again, it’s a totally different Kitchener than what I knew.

I toured THEMUSEUM facility today down at King and Queen, and looked at what they have presently and what their plans are for the future. And that stuff didn’t exist [before]. We had the Centre in the Square and that was it.

Q – And the Aud for Ranger games.

A – Exactly.

I think this is a real tipping point for Kitchener. If this takes off – and it feels like it’s on the runway – this will be the Silicon Valley of Canada.

It should be; you’ve got the universities, you’ve got the minds, you’ve got a couple of enormous companies here, and perhaps their troubles will ironically be a reason this area, in a way, booms.

It’s ironic to say that, obviously, but I think a lot of good might come out of this time of flux right now, and it seems like Communitech is sort of poised to be the epicentre of it.

Q – Where is home today for you?

A – Home for me is Los Angeles.

Q – So you’re still in LA, but you’ve stepped back a bit from full-time film work in Hollywood?

A – I did for a moment. I did the stuff in Kenya.

Going forward, Hollywood is still in Hollywood; you know, the business of Hollywood still happens there. On the level that I’m talking about, the agents are there, the studios are there, and that’s where I need to be to get things going.

We might shoot a movie in Australia or South Africa or something, but the actual process of getting it going all happens there, so I’ve got to be there. And that’s where I’ll hopefully open the doors to a new shop pretty soon.

Q – What prompted you to take that step back and do the Kenya stuff? It sounds like a real departure, and that maybe you needed that.

A – I think I did.

I felt like I was hardworking but also lucky when I was very young, and just got on this treadmill and I didn’t get off. I didn’t know how exhausting it was until I stopped, and I didn’t know where my late 20s had gone, where my 30s had gone.

I had a great time, I learned a lot and I was proud of some of the movies that I worked on, but I had never stopped to smell the roses, and also I questioned some of what I saw in Hollywood. I didn’t like everything I saw.

I think there’s good people and bad people in almost every industry, and I think Hollywood gets an extremely bad name that it shouldn’t; you know, I think there’s probably great people at Tim Hortons and bad people at Tim Hortons.

Hollywood is no different, it’s just bigger and noisier so it gets the extremes; everything is to extremes there, both on the good side and the bad side.

Having seen some of the bad, and also I had lost a friend; a friend of mine passed away who was of a similar age, and I think that was also a wake-up call to say, ‘Wow, you know, life is short, and think about what you’re doing, and does it matter?’

So I made a concerted effort to get far away, and was lucky enough to find this amazing little orphanage in Kenya. They took me in almost as a new resident, and it was a beautiful experience.

I lived there for a month in 2010 and a month in 2011, and had an ongoing relationship with them between those times. I did a lot of fundraising for them.

One of the areas that gets hit hardest in a recession is charity; it’s one of the first things to get impacted, and it’s where people save money as well. You know, ‘Maybe I’ve got to not sponsor that kid I’ve been sponsoring in Africa this year,’ and the orphanage ran into a lot of that, so they were having trouble keeping their doors open and keeping all the kids intact there.

What I learned on my first trip over is that it’s an epidemic in Africa, the millions of orphans that exist. A lot of them are the result of parents dying of AIDS, but even putting that aside, there’s about 40 million orphans in Africa, which is an absurd number.

And no one’s adopting them. There’s a few adoptions to the States and things, but generally speaking, there’s a generation of kids growing up without parents over there.

It was shocking to see that, and it just seemed like there was an obvious need to try to do a little bit in this orphanage, because no one’s adopting them. Those kids, if I go back in five years, will be the same kids until they’ve outgrown the place.

Q – And then they have to face adult life on their own.

A – Yeah.

One of the things I’m sort of proud of in these efforts was, they had to attend a local school, but there was no local high school, so the kids at age 15 were going to be booted out of the home and have to relocate somehow to go to high school.

We did a number of fundraisers over the last couple of years where we raised the money to put a high school into the region that will service both the community and the orphans, so now they’ll be able to stay at the orphanage through to age 17 or 18, until they’re more adults, which I think will make a big difference.

I guess my point is, I’ll have an ongoing relationship with this place because of the nature of the orphanage. They’re not orphanages; they’re not waiting facilities for adoptions. They’re homes, and the residents don’t change, which is beautiful because they’re all in it together and they really become a family, and it’s also sad because they’re not going anywhere.

Q – I’m assuming you came back with a resolve to resume with the talents you’d learned before in Hollywood, but to channel them in a more meaningful way.

A – Yeah, I think so.

The movies are not going to be about orphans in Kenya necessarily, but I ended up being so close to movies that I sort of forgot how powerful they were, for good or for bad, you know?

They’re big, noisy pieces of entertainment that are international, and people are seeing them in multiple languages, and you can reach a lot of people. So, if you’re going to do that anyways, why not try to have a little medicine go down with the sugar?

I’d never want to beat people over the head with stuff. One of the things that came about with my photography efforts in Kenya – and I’ve actually had some criticisms about this – is that I don’t think we’ve ever shown a picture of an unhappy child.

First of all, I found these kids to be amazingly happy. That’s what I found. They were loving, thankful, really happy children, so that’s what I photographed, and that’s how they photographed each other.

In my fundraising efforts, when I’ve sort of shown these exhibitions and stuff, a couple of people have said, ‘Well, they look fine to me. Why didn’t you show me a sad kid?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s not real to what I saw, and it’s not who I am; I don’t want to beat you over the head with it.’

The flipside of it is, I think a lot of people have responded. You know, some of those images, when you see things from Somalia or wherever, they’re so disturbing that you don’t want to look at the photo. Here you’re seeing a picture of a smiling kid – I mean, look at my business cards; the cutest, smiling gleeful kid – I want to know more about them; I want to help that kid.

I just need to be told he’s in poor circumstances or whatever, but I’m not scared to look at his photo. I’m engaged with that. And a lot of people who have connected with me on this website, they say it’s because of their own kids who are drawn to this website, because they’re just sort of seeing these happy kids on the other side of the world, and they say, ‘Mom, who are these kids?’ and the parent will explain, ‘Oh, you know, they maybe don’t have parents’ or ‘they’re poor.’

And I’ve had more people come to me and say, ‘My kids found your website and they’re having a birthday party this year, and they want to know what the kids over there need’ because instead of getting presents this year, they’re going to ask their friends to give them shoes or whatever to send over to the kids.

Which has been amazing, and it’s all because they’re connecting through photographs with their peers on the other side of the world, and I think in large part because they’re happy photos.

If they were depressing images, you’d drive some people away.

Q – Do you see possibilities here in your old home town that you could incorporate into your new venture down in LA?

A – Absolutely.

The state of the art is so international; we’re all so connected now.

Even when I was posting my last couple of movies – you know, effects on one picture might have been done in Bulgaria and some were being done in Australia – there is no reason that large components of the film process can’t happen right back here.

There will always be a need for locations, but what I’ve just seen today in the HIVE there, I mean, I think we’re going to approach a time when locations are obsolete, it’s amazing.

But certainly in the post-production area, there should be a tremendous opportunity here; in the online marketing areas, and with appropriate content, the social gaming aspect, there should be numerous opportunities to connect the dots between what people are doing today.

A lot of them, on a technical level, have surpassed my knowledge of expertise by a mile – or a kilometre – or 1.6 kilometres – and that’s awesome, and I want to learn from them.

Q – Does that mean you’re planning to spend a bit more time back here?

A – I’m going to try and spend more time. I want to talk more to these guys about who is your ambassador in LA for all of these people? You know, you should have somebody there, full-time, saying ‘I’m the Communitech guy.’

I might actually apply for that job myself.

If Bil hadn’t reached out to me, I wouldn’t know this place exists. Again, I’m not seeking this stuff out yet, but it’s amazing what’s here.

Bil was at one of those meals and said ‘we should talk more about this.’

As I’m starting to build a new thing, I’m a startup all over again in my own way, so it’s about like-minded people, and what’s important to me – being proud of what I do, liking who I’m with while doing it.

And the fact that I’m a five-hour flight away doesn’t really matter. It really doesn’t matter in this era of Skype and everything else. We might as well be sitting next door.