A Hollywood Manager Explains the New Rules of Show Biz

21:06Peter Kafka:You have an audience that you've gotten on YouTube and TikTok and wherever. And are there people who say, well, that sounds fine, but I don't actually want to sell them whatever. I want to make movies. Lots of artists do that. And then there's some artists that are like, oh, you know, I love being in this position where people have an affinity to what I like. And I like to point them to things that I really like. And if there's a good business in me doing it at the same time, it's an essential shift, right? Because what's happening is the data we see is people are trusting government and corporations less and less every day.

21:40That's not much of a revelation of a thought, but it's certainly there and we see it. What they do trust more and more in the world where AI is like, is this video real? Is that real? What is that?

21:49Peter Kafka:They trust other human beings even more and more now. So what is the challenge in doing a business like that? Because the idea of like, oh, this person is going to have multifaceted things and they're going to be a multi-hyphenate and they're not just going to be a talent. They're also going to be a business person. Most of those stories generally don't pan out. Most people don't want to spend their time running a business. They don't have the capacity to run a business. And in the end, it turns out they were essentially just sort of getting money for endorsing a product. Nothing wrong with that.

22:16Peter Kafka:It's just not a new paradigm. Not a new paradigm, no. It's a balance of there's like kind of three or four lanes, right? There's the – you get paid money to endorse something and what you try to push your talent partners is – and endorse the things that you really believe in. Endorse the things that you really like because I think the audience feels it and they know it when it's like, why are you endorsing that? It's weird. And then you go, well, then there's the things of can you own part of it? Can part of our job be instead of clamoring that the Hawaii Five-O model is gone, can we say, we're not replacing that back-end thing.

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23:27And we're helping you dream up things that you go, oh, I'd always like to have a mobile game. But that feels like, how am I going to do that? You know? And so most of them don't work is the crazy thing, right? And so you have to build the right team that understands how to raise capital. You have to build the right team that can write a real business plan. The thing in Hollywood was always like people would have ideas. Like, I have an idea. I want to do this. But nobody really sat with them to say, well, let's write a business plan that will raise money. Because if you don't have that, the business is not going to happen unless you're funding it.

24:00Peter Kafka:We'll be back with Pete Michelli. But first, a word from a sponsor.

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26:31Peter Kafka:And we're back. You mentioned the idea that these people have huge reach. That seems very relevant to the other thing you mentioned, which was the success of Obsessions and Back Rooms. Yep. And before that, Iron Lung. These are all movies made by people who had meaningful audiences on YouTube. And in at least some of those cases brought their audience from YouTube to the theaters, made a gazillion dollars. A couple of questions for you, but let's start with what does it mean for you guys if we move into a world where success at the box office or somewhere else is sort of based on an audience that talent has sort of accumulated on their own?

27:12Peter Kafka:How does that change the discussions you have with the people who might pay them or distribute them? Well, it's extraordinary. So I always looked at content as a four-part problem. And so our company is attacking all four. So it's like you've got to have talented people to make great things, one, right? Most important. Two, you need to have money to get it to happen. You need financing, right? Three, you need distribution. And four, you need awareness creation, right? Let the audience know that something they might be interested in is there and how to find it. Four-part problem. It's always kind of been that part.

27:48The people that control distribution used to control the world. It was just like if you wanted to get in somebody's home or you wanted to get a movie, you needed to control the theaters.

27:57Peter Kafka:There were a dozen people who sort of determined whether that could happen or not. Everything. The world we live in today, no one controls distribution. It is like you have these really powerful, sophisticated streaming services that have the capital to put out the highest-end content at volume. But the social media platforms prove to us every day you can reach hundreds of millions of people on your own if you have something compelling and you know how to get to them. So you're looking at these four factors and you're going, well, this is a remarkable time that distribution is more fluid and democratic than we've ever seen.

28:31And you go, so what is awareness creation? And so awareness creation is how do you aggregate community online to know something is there that they may want to transact on? And so we have a division called awareness creation that does exactly that. So we just kind of have this expertise of building communities so we can point people to things. And so – and we've done it on a bunch of movies that we've made and it's been quite remarkable. And so what you're – but the key now is we used to have like billboards and commercials that used to be a revelation for us, right? Like, oh, this is an important movie.

29:06I saw three commercials, right? And when you're living in Los Angeles or anywhere, you know, you pull up to a red light and you used to look up at the billboards and go, what's important? Now you pull up to the red light and you grab your phone. Everybody grabs their phone. They look down. And so this digital marketing strategy becomes even more and more important as the world moves forward.

29:25Peter Kafka:But I mean, the distribution and awareness are both on the same platform, right? If you're a Markiplier fan. You mean in terms of the algorithm pointing you from, oh, you watch this, so go to the next thing? Just say you build your audience. And I mean, most people who were not hanging out on YouTube, most people who were not teenagers were unaware of obsessions or back rooms prior to it popping out. And then it just surprised the hell out of everyone. Same thing with Iron Lung. They had built this audience on this platform. People have been tracking this forever. Like, when are people going to migrate from digital to big time to TV or movies?

30:01Peter Kafka:And they tried a lot of them and most of them didn't work. And I just sort of believe like, oh, we've learned that those audiences don't move. But now it looks like they can move. You can bring a YouTube fan to a theater and they'll buy a ticket to see you. So how does that change the equation of how you structure a deal? If someone can say, I can plausibly bring 20 million people or a percentage of them to the theater or to a TV show. Well, there's an entire science to, oh, you have 100 million followers, but how many of them are actually real? What's your conversion ratio? All these, there's so much nuance to that.

30:38But yeah, one of the things we really focus on is how do you ascribe value to somebody that has 20 million followers? And you're like, oh, we made a piece of content for this. And they're going to be speaking to 20 million people that have already deemed this person important to them and they will listen to them. What's the value in that in launching an obsession? And so there's a couple systems that we've implemented to quantify that value. And when you're talking about making a movie for the small dollars comparatively, you look at that and say, well, that should return itself in the form of some real ownership and some real upside in the box office once you get to profits.

31:18Peter Kafka:Do you think what we saw this spring, three movies from three YouTubers all doing huge business, is that the new paradigm or is that just kind of stars aligning so you happen to have those three at the same time? Should we expect more YouTube people to have huge movies? Yeah, we should. You know, the technology that exists today, it's just allowing so many younger people to be creators much earlier in their career. And so the tools that are available for them to kind of put a story together, it's not the new paradigm. It'll just be part of the paradigm. You know, we'll still want the big tentpole.

31:55You know, I went to go see Mandalorian with my kids this weekend. I know Favreau well. It was like such a great movie, so fun. And then, you know, I saw Pressure with some friends. It was another great movie. And then you look at the data that we're seeing is this notion of the doom scrolling is a real thing. And people want to get out of the house and not be lost two hours flipping through their social platforms. And so we see an uptick in experiential and live events. and we see an uptick if technology brings costs down where there's more offerings of movie, we believe people are going to go to the theaters because it's a fun thing to do.

32:35Peter Kafka:Do you think there's something specific happening now that is either allowing, again, I just keep bringing up YouTubers making movies to sort of make that flip that wasn't there five or 10 years ago? Yeah, the technology is allowing you to tell stories and be able to show things for a lot less money. But most of the stuff they could have made for not much more than they're making for now. The cameras get cheaper and better, but it's still the same. I would give you that. If your suggestion is, hey, over the last five years, more people are becoming acutely aware of, you know, when Netflix goes and argues why they should get Warner Brothers, it was because YouTube is kicking everybody's ass.

33:15YouTube's growing faster than anybody can keep up with.

33:18Peter Kafka:Yeah, you always have to have a bigger competitor to you to make your case. We're not number one. We're number two. And they're number one and we need this to keep up with them. And I do think – I think your point is that people are becoming more cognizant of what a great functioning tool YouTube is. And so people are spending more time on YouTube than anywhere else. It's starting to normalize in terms of contemporary culture. And those could absolutely be factors. I do maintain that the technology and the tools we've gotten from AI in the last year or two have helped storytellers like demonstrate what's possible.

33:52Peter Kafka:Let's get to AI in one second. I'm assuming that this is, in fact, I'm sure it's happening now, but you tell me that after the success of those three movies we've been talking about, that everyone has been told, go find me the next YouTuber making a movie. And you, on the one hand, say, that's a stupid idea. We're all just following the flock. On the other hand, it kind of seems like a good idea to scour YouTube. So how are you guys thinking about that? Are you giving it more attention than you would have six months ago or a year ago? Yeah, we have a couple divisions. Look, we represent, from a management perspective, more influencers than any other company.

34:25We're really well-versed on the social platforms. We do a lot. We have a big relationship with Google and YouTube. We created a company with them called 100 Zeros. So we're in deep with them. And yes, we have a system in which we are tracking to where we see, hey, is it gone from 500 views to 10 ,000 views? Why did that happen? Because once it gets to 100 million views, everybody in the world knows about it. So the answer is yes, and we have a couple systems because the dynamic nature of our platform is we wanted to be in all of these businesses because of how much everything is shifting. So we wanted to have an expertise on the social platforms.

35:04We wanted to have an expertise on how talent is telling stories there and how people are moving community there because it was going to help every part of our business. So the answer is yes, we're fully doing it. And we've made a bunch of horror movies. We made Long Legs. that was by any stretch a low budget you know Oz Perkins is an incredible he's an incredible director and there'll be a Long Legs 2 and then you and we made The Monkey and these are movies that we're making for relatively speaking a lot less money than the average

35:33Peter Kafka:And that's always been part of horror's appeal right? They're cheap you can reliably get people it's why Jason Blum got his start and still is crushing it in horror because you can make popular things for not much Yeah and you don't necessarily want a bunch of huge movie stars in horror because it kind of takes you out of the, I'm here for a horror movie. Right. You know, and the budgets aren't, they can't really afford them. And so you get, you know, you get, you get, you can get a star or two that like everybody knows. So it's like, oh, this is a real thing. So you're always balancing that stuff out.

36:04The feeling of, oh, this is an important movie. We got Nick Cage in Long Legs. This is an important movie. And we hear it's great. And the filmmaker is great. Okay, let's go. And then the word of mouth takes you. and then or you you see what happened with obsession is you just have somebody who has such an active audience and it became like a gift so obsession and backrooms both worked with

36:25Peter Kafka:traditional studios at one point for distribution uh iron long was really just the guy did it by himself um do you can you imagine a world in which more people really try to like do this stuff basically on their own and keep everything for themselves or do you think they're going to mostly work with the established distributors? It's going to be a balance. It's definitely going to change. It's going to be a balance. You just see from, if you just pay attention to YouTube and the volume of people that are creating on YouTube, it's going to be an undeniable force. How they kind of get into the existing system so they're marked credible, the story is great, it could sustain itself as a premium piece of content, that's still going to be a little bit bumpy, but it's going to be exciting to like, look, I always, there's a great quote that we found early on that was like an inspiration for our company, which was, you know, talent is distributed equally all over the world, but opportunity is not.

37:22I forgot who said it. So it's definitely not me. I just repeated a lot. And it was just this, this notion of, you know, there were so many gatekeepers to becoming a best in class storyteller. And those are breaking down, which is going to be really exciting. You think in a world of AI where that's going to change the workforce, creativity is not something that we can do without in humanity.

37:45Peter Kafka:And that's going to really open it up. You've been champing at the bit to talk about AI. So no, let's do it. We're at the AI part of the conversation. So a couple of years ago during the strikes, it went from we're not getting paid enough or we're concerned about our pay too. AI is going to take over our business. I thought that was a little overcooked then and maybe counterproductive. but now it also seems like it's a pretty reasonable concern. Maybe you're not having AI actors yet, and maybe scripts aren't being written by AI, but it seems like it is hollowing out or has the potential to hollow out lots and lots of human work in your business.

38:20Yeah, I mean, I look at it as, I am not the arbiter or control of, and we at Range are not the arbiter or control of how AI is implemented in the world.

38:28Peter Kafka:That is... Because right now, the good version of it is, no, no, this is just going to allow us to make things more cheaply and we can do previs and we can do more stuff with it. We're not doing less. But inevitably someone looks around and goes, yeah, we can do this for less. That involves hiring this many less humans. It is. Here's how we have to look at it. I don't, we don't have a choice. It's going to shift the job responsibilities in Hollywood. And so you look at it and say, we can't stop AI from entering because there's going to to be all these people all over the world that are going to use these AI tools that aren't going to listen to me or anyone else say, don't use them.

39:06They're going to start to create them. And now the distribution is available to anyone. There's no gatekeeper that can prevent it. So if you come to that determination that it's not preventable, which I fundamentally believe, then you go, well, how do we advise our clients and partners to succeed in this environment? And then you look at it and you go, well, then go back to the Warner Brothers example. How come they weren't sustainable. The costs for these movies and TV shows were getting so huge and the long tail wasn't there for them. So it became an unsustainable business as their own, the debt mounted.

39:39So you go, well, well then how do we get to a place where there are a lot of jobs because we are making more things for less money and you're just shifting where people work. We take it very, very seriously in terms of, well, my God, if we can make more hit movies because the cost of the movies come down and we can put more into play, then we are going to get more people to work consistently. And that's where we have to go because the genie's out of the bottle. And so I don't know. I have not heard one person that has like a, oh, we're going to do it this way. We're going to mandate it this way.

40:12It's uncontrollable now because distribution is not controllable by Hollywood anymore.

40:17Peter Kafka:Do you see a room for some version of like the organic restaurant where someone says, nothing in our production has been touched by it? For sure. And that'll be beautiful. And that'll attract a certain crowd. Exactly right. And that's the thing is like, you know, people are too much content and I'm like, well, is there too much content on YouTube because it seems to be working? Are there too many songs and music because that seems to be working? Like if we lower the price point of these movies, then there's less – we need a smaller subculture to say I love it for it to be profitable. And we're just – that's just an unstoppable path for us right now.

40:53So for us to not do hustle around the clock to understand how our clients and partners could thrive in the new world order would be – we'd be irresponsible.

41:03Peter Kafka:Seems like for your business, you're kind of sketching out a world where you guys have to work really hard to find more clients who may not make as much on any individual project. And the upside you're hoping is there's just a lot more people out there that you can work with? It's actually the opposite. So what we decided was to have a more balanced density of really impactful artists, exceptional talent, and bring them more opportunities in different areas, not just their core business. So they saw more opportunity from us, and we didn't have to have so many clients that it became impossible to service.

41:41So for us, it was establish opportunities in their core and in production and telling stories and what they do on the social platforms and businesses that they build and move them around those pillars. And so we give them more opportunity. We do more together and it's more balanced that way. Then at the same time, you're always looking for the new voices that are doing things that are really, really innovative.

42:07Peter Kafka:If someone comes to you and says, I'm a new voice or whatever, I'm a talent, you want to work with me, here's the thing. I do not want to sell anything. I don't want to make other projects. I don't want to do – what I want to do is work on my TV shows or my movies or whatever. That's all I want to do. And your pitch sounds great except I'm not interested in it. But would you still work with someone like that? You know, it so depends. Like it's just not – we just never hear that. Really? Mostly when people come in, they're like, oh, thank God, because it feels like we're in a bear market in film and TV or in music.

42:39They come in and like, yeah, we want to do all – I would just tell you overwhelmingly most of the artists that come in, the creators come in. They're really excited to kind of think in a dream factory way. It's just like – it's just more of a balanced life.

42:53Peter Kafka:As an aside, quite remarkable to see Steven Spielberg at whatever age he's at out there doing podcasts to promote a movie. Has to. He doesn't have to. Steven Spielberg. He doesn't have to. But it seems like he has made a determination that he wants lots of people to see his movie. And the best way for him to do that is not to have his stars do that. Normally the stars would be out there. He's going to go hang out with Amy Poehler. That's right. I would say, yeah, Steven Spielberg doesn't have to do anything. He is, you know, Mount Rushmore. I mean, you know, like I remember crying. The first movie I ever cried in was E.T.

43:22when I was like probably eight. The fact that I cannot wait to go see his movie. I am so excited to see his movie. But if you're Steven Spielberg, I've been in a couple meetings with him over the years. Like you just – you poured your heart and soul into making this thing. You want people to know it's important to you. And that's why you go to the podcast.

43:43Peter Kafka:Well, he always felt that way. But now he seems to have come to the conclusion that, well, I guess the way for that to happen is I have to go do the work. Yeah, and it's not because anybody – most people are – if they're aware that the Steven Spielberg movie is out there and he's proud of it and it's going to be great. but there's so much noise. Like, how do you know back in the day of Indiana Jones or whatever, it was the only commercials you'd see were Indiana. Like you have to go see that. We'll be back with range media's Pete Michelli, but first a word from a sponsor.

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45:57Peter Kafka:And we're back. Tell me about Google briefly. You work at Google. You made something called 100 zeros. Tell me about that. So it's a company we created. A Google is actually what the real number is, and it has 100 zeros behind it. What is it? So it's a company that we created that is investing in content production. We launched this thing called XPRIZE. it's the first global film competition which is quite extraordinary um i did some research um on gemini and it's like there hasn't been a really global film competition i think there was one in 2003 and then one in 1932 and it's the idea of we want to tell positive stories a la more star trek where technology in the world and humanity is going to get better because of technology not worse.

46:41And so we open it up and we've raised a bunch of money with our partner, Peter Diamantis, and the XPRIZE team for people are going to submit. I think we have 2 ,500 people that have registered and we're going to pick the best idea and we're going to go make a film that is putting the way where humanity is going in technology in a positive light.

47:01Peter Kafka:What does Google get out of this? Google is, there's a bunch of things. They wanted to deepen their relationship in the entertainment community by being part of the solution. So being able to invest in content, invest in storytelling. We're in a flow together to say, okay, what are the AI tools that are really going to help production? Which one should we implement? Which one shouldn't we implement? And then it's for us to innovate the way that stories get to the world. So we launched a microdrama program together, these vertical dramas. it's, I think, the most dynamic one here. If Google wants to make content, they can pay people to do it themselves.

47:45Peter Kafka:They've done that. They can also do what they're doing now and just say, we have YouTube. Make content on YouTube. Why do they need to be involved with an agency? They don't want to. We're a management company. Sorry. We'll get to it. Yeah. They don't want, they didn't want to be the lead of like, hey, we're in Hollywood now and we're as good as any of these other companies. They wanted to partner with a company like Range that lends itself towards distribution to say, how do we innovate in storytelling? How can we be part of that? We have all these wonderful tools. Range, do you believe that?

48:17And can you innovate in storytelling? So when we sat down and I was like, oh, this XPRIZE thing, what an amazing thing to do together. We launched a short film program. So a lot of what we're doing with Google, outside of them investing in some of the traditional things, sentimental value they invested in, a couple other big – some movies that really helped. It's like, well, distribution is changing radically. What can we offer artists to do? And so we have so many people going to work on our vertical drama program. And you go, well, they have Google TV. That gets to 150 million eyeballs, the new app they put in.

48:49Then we can build a premium YouTube vertical channel that we can get to billions of people. And it's creating a bunch of work. I mean, not a work in a negative way. It's creating a bunch of opportunity for people to go to work and tell stories in a different way. And so what we feel is really important for us and why I leaned in the Google relationship was, man, everything is changing so quickly. We have to be involved with some of these titans to understand what's possible.

49:14Peter Kafka:It seems like a no-brainer for you. You corrected me earlier. I referred you as an agency, a management group. Again, I brought this up earlier. The distinction, manager, agent, lawyer, legally important distinctions, all kind of broadly in the same bucket. Leads me to you guys. A lot of the people you're working with came out of CAA. CAA has been involved in this long-running legal fight with you guys over, I guess, back-end participation in CAA's dollars. Does that impact your business in any way? No, it doesn't. And it's, you know, we're just, we're coming to the end of the road on it, which is nice.

49:55There's been a bunch of stuff reported on where we sit today. And it's, you know, you come into the business at scale. And when we sat down to kind of map out what it was, it was like we were in the middle of a pandemic. It was pure chaos. And the inception of our company just came from what do we want our lives to be? like as the world was falling apart like what do you want your life to be and so generally in Hollywood you a lot of the higher end uh um more established talent has an agent and manager and those relationships were you know they would kind of work in flow and there's a Venn diagram and there's overlap but the agents field the offers and most of our clients in film and tv by and I mean like like I'm talking like 95 percent of them have agents too and we love our working relationships with agencies.

50:45And it's like a lot of it is, you know, we're in the place of, you know, don't come into this territory too big, too fast. We don't like it. Yeah.

50:53Peter Kafka:And I should add, there's a long history of legal fights between people who leave agencies or management groups. And because what you're hoping to do is bring your talent with you. The people who are leaving are very upset about that. It gets solved in the court one way or the other. It really, it'll get the, you know, the TA will solve it ultimately, I think. But it doesn't, None of it is nobody's operating illegally. We felt like, man, when CA took ICM off the board, there was a consolidation of now what you would consider three high-level agencies. Not a lot of choice for talent. And so, like, we enter in, like, you know, in a way that has never happened before.

51:33And it makes people uncomfortable.

51:36Peter Kafka:We've been talking about disruption and how the business has been disrupted by technology. you've been describing how you're trying to do things differently, but it also seems at the core that you're representing talent and you share in their success via some sort of participation. What disrupts that business model one day? I'm sure people have been talking forever. Why do I need an agent or a manager? Why can't I just do this on my own? Why can't I take those fees back for myself? It is. I mean, I think we're more needed now than ever. The relationship is, of course like that'd be insane to say anything else but the relationship now is it it is so much harder now to advise given how much shift is in the marketplace your answer is the world's fucking crazy you need someone like us to yeah that is the truth the world is crazy and the studios are changing the movie studios are changing you know week over month and you know how do you get a movie made and what you know the rules of engagement and the streaming platforms and how do you sell to them.

52:35And, but you know, like I, I was, you know, with some very talented artists last night and they were asked me a very similar question. Like, is there a future for us? And I'm like, people will always, humanity will always want great storytelling. How we get it to the people, that's always going to change.

52:55Peter Kafka:I'm asking about your role in that. That's always going to change. And we're needed now, in my opinion, more than ever to help translate, communicate, help people understand how the shift in distribution is going to impact them and how they can succeed in it. In the days of broadcast network and where it was just like, oh, you have pilot season, you get shows ordered or not. I mean, I started at CA November 6, 1995. I literally, when I was starting in the mailroom for minimum wage and you would walk around the hallway, there were still typewriters on the desks of the assistants. That's when I started, there were typewriters on the desk.

53:29And it was just like kind of an all or nothing game. You got shows picked up in May or you were out for the year. The level of complexity now and the level of complexity in terms of dealing with the streaming platforms, then what is a direct to consumer content strategy? Should we do a vertical drama? Should we do independent film? You know, like the level of complexity now, I would put it at 10 X what it was in 2000.

53:54Peter Kafka:Pete Michelli, you've made your case for your business. More important to us, you have explained to us how Hollywood works in 2026. Thanks for coming in. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks again to Pete Michelli. Thanks again to Charlotte Silver, who produces and edits our show. Thanks to our advertisers. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you next week.

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