For Derek Elliott, the move made perfect sense. Since 1995, the president and CEO of the Toronto-based Elliott Management Group (EMI) has been managing the Sun Village Resort & Spa in the Dominican Republic, a resort he launched that’s popular with wealthy tourists.

But Elliott, who says he sees himself as a creative entrepreneur, was looking for additional challenges and discussed the prospects of producing motion pictures with Media 8 Entertainment – the L.A.-based production company behind such films as The Upside of Anger and the Oscar-winning Monster.

‘Media 8 has done some extremely strong work,’ he notes. ‘The second film they produced was Monster, which won Charlize Theron a best-actress Oscar.’

That led Elliott and EMI to their first collaboration with Media 8, the ‘family-friendly’ US$12-million romantic comedy Lovewrecked, about an 18-year-old (Amanda Bynes of What a Girl Wants) shipwrecked on a desert island with a rock star she idolizes (Chris Carmack of The O.C.).

In order to buy time with her hero, she fails to mention that they aren’t marooned at all, and that the resort she works for is just around the corner.

Written by Stephen Langford and directed by Randal Kleiser (Grease, The Blue Lagoon), Lovewrecked was produced by Media 8 and exec produced by Elliott.