Enid natives Thad and Trent Luckinbill hit Hollywood

Call them the Tinsel Twins.

Thad and Trent Luckinbill were born April 24, 1975, in Enid, and they’ve since gone Hollywood and produced their first movie together, “The Good Lie” starring Reese Witherspoon, which opened Friday in select cities nationwide.

“It’s one of those movies that just shows you what’s right about the human spirit and its triumph over tragedy,” Thad Luckinbill said in a phone interview last week from Los Angeles.

“We were really proud — especially for our first movie — to be talking about something so important and have such a powerful message of inspiration behind a project like this,” said Trent Luckinbill from New York City on the same day.

“The Good Lie,” directed by Philippe Falardeau (“Monsieur Lazhar”) from a screenplay by Margaret Nagle (HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”), is a fictionalized account of South Sudanese children orphaned by a brutal civil war in the late 1980s, and forced to flee from certain death at the hands of the northern militia, some walking up to 1,000 miles over treacherous terrain to reach the safety of the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

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More than a decade later, as young adults, many of these “Lost Boys” (and girls) of Sudan are given the opportunity to settle in America. This story focuses on the journey of three young men and a girl and their struggle to adapt to 21st-century American culture with all of its strange customs and high-tech trappings (such as telephones and light switches), under the guidance of a tough-minded but soft-hearted employment counselor, played by Witherspoon.

It’s a movie with the potential to be a very big hit, and the production company Black Label Media, newly formed by the Luckinbill twins and Molly Smith — a producer whose resume already includes “P.S. I Love You,” “Something Borrowed” and “Beautiful Creatures” — financed “The Good Lie” and brought it to life.

The road to Hollywood

But it wasn’t an overnight journey from Enid to this Tinseltown catbird seat the Luckinbills now occupy.

Trent earned a law degree at the University of Oklahoma and has an extensive legal and financial background in the private and public sectors at the Department of Treasury’s Office of Financial Stability, as a lawyer at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., and in private equity groups after that.

Thad took a business degree from OU and moved to California, where he went to work for a producer and studied acting. He’s been a producer and actor for nearly 15 years, perhaps best-known for his role as J.T. Hellstrom on the CBS soap opera “The Young and the Restless.”

When he decided to get really serious about producing and financing big-time, quality films with Smith, they recruited his brother Trent as a partner, for his financial expertise.

“So with Trent’s help and the three of us coming together, we sort of had the right equation to go forward and were able to pursue it, were able to raise the funds and start the company, and then we were off to the races,” Thad said. “And ‘The Good Lie’ was our first project. And that came from Imagine Entertainment, which is operated by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, who are both producers on the film as well. They had the script, and we merged with them and were able to finance the film, and we creatively produced it.”

Fellow Oklahoman Howard, of course, is best-known as “Opie" on TV’s “The Andy Griffith Show,” and “Richie Cunningham” on “Happy Days,” not to mention his directing credits on many a major motion picture of the last four decades, including “Apololo 13,” “The Cinderella Man” and “A Beautiful Mind.”

The Luckinbill twins are hoping “The Good Lie“ will raise awareness about the ongoing crisis in South Sudan, where thousands of people are still stuck in refugee camps and civil war has just broken out anew.

To that end, United Nations Children’s Fund has chosen to partner with the producers of “The Good Lie” in a massive fund-raising effort.

“UNICEF came on (and) we started thegoodliefund.org based on the response we were getting to the movie,” Trent said. “We wanted to create a place where people could go and give to the lost boys and girls both in the United States and the refugee camps in South Sudan. They threw a big New York screening for a lot of the critics and folks here in New York that hadn’t seen it.”

There was also a special screening in Oklahoma City last week for the Luckinbills’ friends and family, including their parents, Dennis and Anna Sue Luckinbill, who still live in Enid.

Busy buddies

Meanwhile, the twins and partner Smith have been busy with other projects, including “Begin Again,” with Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, and the British film “71,” starring Jack O’Connell. French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s border war drama “Sicario,” starring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro has just wrapped in New Mexico, and shooting is underway in New York for “Demolition,” directed by Jean-Marc Valee (“Dallas Buyer’s Club”) and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts and Chris Cooper. The story centers on an investment banker dealing with his emotions following the tragic death of his wife.

“It’s one of my favorite scripts I’ve read in probably my entire time in Hollywood and I really look forward to seeing how it turns out,” Thad said.

He also announced that Black Label Media has bought the rights to Barry Switzer’s autobiography “Bootlegger’s Boy,” with plans to film it in Oklahoma.

“Yeah, I would relish bringing anything back to Oklahoma, if we can make it work,” Thad said.

Meanwhile, Thad said he will continue to take acting jobs whenever time allows. Trent, on the other hand, says he has no intention of stepping in front of a camera again, after his experience on an episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” when he was persuaded to play a corpse with his brother.

“Acting? No chance,” Trent said. “I’ve never been interested. Let me tell you, I got arm-twisted into that role when I went to visit him on set. He was playing both sides of twins and they looked at me and said, ‘Hey, you go lie on that table and you’ll save us a whole lot of visual effects money. All we need is one scene. One scene we can’t get around.’

“And they kind of cornered me into it and against my better judgment I laid there and they said it would be easy and it was the hardest afternoon of my life. If there was ever any interest there’s none now. But I’ve always been on the legal side and the business side and very interested in the entertainment industry, from that perspective. I’ll leave (acting) up to Thad.”