Annette Sharp: Jodi Matterson leaves Made Up Stories and Bruna Papandrea

Powerhouse producers Jodi Matterson and Bruna Papandrea have ended the seven-year partnership that created huge TV and movie hits, writes Annette Sharp.

Australian box office duo Bruna Papandrea and Jodi Matterson are going their separate ways.

The business partnership behind movies The Dry, Force of Nature: The Dry 2, Penguin Bloom, and TV series Nine Perfect Strangers and The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart has ended after seven years.

The split is said to be largely born of Matterson’s desire to climb out from the shadow of her higher profile and more established business partner Papandrea, and Papandrea’s husband, controversial US producer Steve Hutensky.

The trio have worked together since 2017 and joined forces after Papandrea and Hutensky founded Made Up Stories following Papandrea’s 2016 split from her former production partner Reese Witherspoon.

A statement confirmed the split on Friday. Papandrea and Hutensky said: “We’re so grateful for the terrific partnership with Jodi over the last seven years.

Producers Jodi Matterson (l to r), Steve Hutensky, Bruna Papandrea and Emma Cooper at the Australian premiere of the movie Penguin Bloom. Picture: Toby Zerna

“Jodi was integral in establishing Made Up Stories here in Australia as we grew from our beginning in Los Angeles to now operating across the US, Australia and the UK. We wish her the best in the next chapter of her career.”

Matterson, who is starting her own venture, said: “I am so excited to be taking on the challenge to continue to tell bold, entertaining stories with collaborators old and new.

“Made Up Stories has been such an enormous part of my life, and I am immensely proud of the work that we have made together as a company. Working with Bruna and Steve and the Made Up Stories team over the last 7 years has been something truly special.”

The Made Up Stories team is credited with boosting the Australian economy by $500 million over the past five years, thanks to its output of high-quality, locally produced TV series and films, which have generated jobs locally.

Yet, despite the back-to-back successes, there have been whispers for the past year the company may have been quietly on the market.

The Made Up Stories trio premiering Strife last year. Picture: Getty Images

The split comes after sections of the entertainment industry called for Screen Australia to review its funding to Made Up Stories due to Hutensky’s historic involvement with Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein.

Hutensky was formerly an entertainment lawyer at Miramax.

During Weinstein’s downfall — over claims he was a rapist and sex predator — it emerged Hutensky had been dispatched to London in 1998 to negotiate a settlement on behalf of Weinstein with Zelda Perkins, a former Miramax assistant subjected to inappropriate comments by Weinstein.

In April, a US court overturned Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction concerning the alleged rape of two other women.

Matterson (left) and Papandrea have been business partners for seven years. Picture: Supplied

Like Papandrea, Matterson, too, is married to a former entertainment lawyer — one-time policy adviser to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, Michael Napthali.

Prior to his surprising turn in government, Napthali had been legal counsel at production company Showtime from 2008 to 2012.

This columnist recalls an earlier iteration of Napthali, who we first encountered in the mid-1990s when he was director of marketing at Sony Music.

After Sony, he was recruited as a judge on the Channel 7 reality series Popstars, which, in its first year, 2000, created the girl singing group Bardot featuring Queensland Marilyn Monroe impersonator Sophie Monk.

Napthali soon after became the band’s manager and, after romancing Monk, moved on later that year with then-Cosmopolitan magazine editor Mia Freedman.

This was during a break in Freedman’s marriage to Jason Lavigne, who she had wed in 1999 and with whom, at that time, she had a three-year-old son.

Freedman and Lavigne would later reunite and welcomed their second child in 2005.

At the time of our original 2001 report, this columnist was informed Napthali met Freedman when Bardot performed at a Cosmopolitan staff party the previous year.

It was a romance Freedman at one time hoped might be expunged from her public record, yet it looks to have borne fruit two decades later when Made Up Stories went searching for local material and came upon Freedman’s unlikely 2017 memoir, Work Strife Balance.

The book was subsequently given a radical reworking — serious credit given to Matterson — to become the Foxtel/Binge series Strife, which, we hear, is going ahead with a second series. This despite some production issues at Christmas and reports Freedman was upset her character (brought to life on TV thanks in part to an ex-boyfriend’s wife), wasn’t more “likeable”.

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