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John W. Mincey Jr. stands in summery twilight at the door to his film and video production company. It is nearly eight o'clock, and he has been in legal meetings most of the day. He rubs his eyes.
``I'm mad at some people, and I'm going to get even," he says. "And the way to get even is to be a success. Because being successful is always the best revenge."
At 46, the veteran filmmaker is directing the most difficult episode of his life. Mincey Productions, saddled with debt and pending legal actions, filed in February for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. It's a fix Mincey never imagined he would be in.
But others involved in the tangled dispute over his film-video company say bankruptcy was the most likely place Mincey seemed destined to end up, given the heavy debt burden he placed on his company.
And while, according to national averages, fewer than 10 percent of businesses that enter Chapter 11 manage to emerge intact, Mincey insists he can beat those odds.
"We're going to get out of this. I didn't plan to be here. We shouldn't be here. But we're going to show it can be done."
The saga of John W. Mincey is perhaps symptomatic of an industry that has grown much too quickly, some observers say, for an area such as San Diego, outstripping the creative needs of the local market.
An accomplished director and cinematographer with almost two decades of feature and commercial filmmaking behind him, Mincey arrived in town two years ago from Portland, Ore., to take over another ailing local company, Western Video. He candidly acknowledges his own inattention to business matters hastened most of his recent problems.
Though a number of factors led him to bankruptcy court, Mincey lays the lion's share of the blame on the management team he hired to oversee the company in his absence much of last year. ``Businesswise, hiring them was probably the worst decision I ever made," he maintains.
Others familiar with the events, however, say Mincey was himself the problem. In rapid succession, they say, he came into an unfamiliar market, made some bad deals and ran up nearly $1 million in debt for new...