Stephen Tsoneff

Steve Tsoneff is a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Century City office.  He currently practices in the firm’s Corporate Transactional Department and its Media, Entertainment and Technology Practice Group.  Mr. Tsoneff focuses primarily on entertainment finance, representing film studios in their distribution and financial matters and banks providing production financing for motion pictures. 

Representative matters include:

• Representation of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation in its slate financing transactions with Dune Capital Management;
• Representation of Universal Pictures in its $150 million sale of Rogue Pictures to Relativity Media;
• Representation of Paramount Pictures in various co-financing and distribution transactions;
• Representation of New Line Cinema/Warner Bros. in its $350 million slate financing transaction with The Royal Bank of Scotland;
• Representation of InterMedia Partners, L.P. in its acquisition of a 50% ownership interest in Cine Latino, the leading Spanish-language movie channel in the U.S.;
• Representation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in various co-financing transactions;
• Representation of Constantin Film AG in various single-picture financing transactions; and
• Representation of Universal Pictures in various international tax-advantaged film financing transactions.

In 2008, Mr. Tsoneff was named by Daily Variety as one of the ten “up and coming” impact dealmakers in the entertainment industry.  He was also named a “Southern California Rising Star” in 2006 and 2007 by Law and Politics and Los Angeles magazines in their 2006 and 2007 Southern California Super Lawyers – Rising Stars Edition, based upon an extensive peer nomination and polling process designed to select only 2.5 percent of Southern California lawyers practicing in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Mr. Tsoneff received his law degree from Columbia University.  While at Columbia, Mr. Tsoneff was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and spent a semester studying at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and American Literature, cum laude, in 1997 from Harvard University.