Eli Roth makes box office gross — literally

Roth graduated in 1994 and spent two years assisting producer Frederick Zollo, the money man behind "Quiz Show" and "Mississippi Burning.: Then he moved to L.A. to write full-time. While collecting unemployment, he wrote the script for "Cabin Fever," about a group of friends on vacation at a mountain cabin; one contracts a flesh-eating virus, and ultimately the friends kill each other out of fear and paranoia. Grim. He says the idea arose from having spent his adolescence coming of age in the era of aids.

"Everyone passed on it," he says. "They said it was too weird and that you can't have a disease as a killer." So Roth later vowed to produce it himself, spending the next six years refining his script while working as a production assistant for films including Howard Stern's "Private Parts" and "Meet Joe Black" and as a stand-in for small-budget art films.

In 2001 Roth started the movie with $50,000 in a bank account. Investors had agreed to put in $400,000, but some bailed three days before the start of filming, and Roth got his father to throw in $110,000 from a retirement fund. (Dad ultimately got his money back plus an additional $300,000.)

Shooting began in October 2001 in North Carolina but was shut down after three weeks because of union problems. They returned to L.A., and Roth had to scrape together $350,000 more to finish shooting and editing. Still short of cash to do sound editing and to convert the film into a format for mass production, he formed a limited liability corporation and sold shares to investors, raising $1.5 million and offering to repay investors before anyone on the film. Roth, who deferred a salary, ended up with a 9 percent stake, which earned him a meager $270,000.

"Cabin Fever" was shown at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival, sparking a bit of a bidding war. Roth sold the rights to publicly held Lionsgate for $3.5 million and $12 million for prints and advertising. "Cabin Fever" ended up being Lionsgate's highest grosser of 2003, pulling in $30.5 million at the box office worldwide.

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Roth next penned "Hostel." The film's violence was unprecedented at the time. One scene shows an American businessman using a blow torch on the eye of a young Japanese woman. A rescuer bursts into the room, spies the woman's bloody face with the wounded eye hanging from its socket and rescues her, handily snipping off the dangling eyeball with a pair of scissors. Yuck!

Sony agreed to finance the movie, but the studio got cold feet after its execs screened the final cut. The studio approached Lionsgate, which agreed to distribute Hostel in the U.S. while Sony kept the international distribution rights.

Roth made "Hostel" for $4.5 million, and the film was released in January 2006. It grossed a total $80 million worldwide in theaters, plus DVD sales of $21 million.

By the premiere of the sequel on June 8 Eli Roth had become his own brand, the film getting heavy promotion as "Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II." This time three coeds traveling through eastern Europe are lured to the torture chamber, where the paying clients are two suburban family guys. Roth ratchets up the violence in this one, including a scene in which one of the coeds is attacked with a scythe by a naked female torturer.

But this is the end of the Hostel series, says Roth, "Too many good movie franchises have been killed by a bad third movie," he says. For his next project Roth is putting down his pen to focus solely on directing. He has been hired by the brothers Weinstein, who created Miramax, to direct the film adaptation of Stephen King's novel "Cell." "Everyone on their cell phones gets zapped and turns into a serial killer," Roth says, perking up at the premise. "It will be very much about the oversaturation of technology."

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