#104 - Jim Gianopulos: The Evolution of Hollywood and Tech

28:54So all of those factors go into the mix. And you don't make that in a vacuum. You don't make that decision in a vacuum. Ultimately, as the studio head, you're the final word on that but you bring in the obviously the creative team the advocates those passionate advocates you bring in the marketing team how are you guys going to sell this how do you feel about this how does it compare to other films that have worked the international folks how are you going to sell this around the world will it resonate around the world or will it seem too you know US-centric or culturally unrelatable or less relatable?

29:34What do the downstream media think is the potential for it? At least back in the day when we had multiple downstream media, now it's a different game. But you bring all these people together and you get their input. And if you have the right people, they feel comfortable giving their honest and forthright opinion. You then listen to all those factors, and then you go to the other part I talked about, which is you do a P &L. The beauty of having consistency across years of experience as a studio or any big producer is that you have metrics that are fairly consistent. If it does this at the box office, it's going to do this downstream, or it's going to cost this or that, And so you have models.

30:23And so you look across a range and you say, okay, if it does 40 million, it's this. And if it does 80 million, it's our a hundred million, whatever it's that. I never looked very far on the right because once you're in profit, that's great. But you kind of look at what are the likely downside and upside possibilities? And you say, okay, well, here's that band and that range is our risk or our opportunity. And then sometimes you'll say, okay, we'll do this, but as we did at Fox, but we want a partner. Or not just another studio. Sometimes you'll bring in other people's money and, you know, lay off a portion of the cost of the movie with an equity partner for 25 % or 30 something percent, sometimes half, Obviously, you give up some of your upside, but it's a balancing of risk.

31:27So a lot of it is that initial evaluation of those key factors, really starting with story and who's making it and what's it about. And then saying, okay, what's the risk profile? And sometimes at a studio, I don't want to belabor this issue, but at a studio, when you're looking across a slate, when we made life a pie we that was a very expensive movie because it was you know a you know a digital tiger was a lot of special effects massive special effect that one director said no i think i can do it you know practical so what do you mean with a tiger and a kid and i looked at And I said, well, you're going to need more than one kid.

32:17So we ended up, so, but why? That movie was, it was, of course, Oscar bait. We knew that. And we also knew that was really, really risky. But that year we had an Ice Age movie, which was the closest thing to a layup and an X-Men movie. And so we looked at the rest of the slate and we said, well, okay, we're in really good shape here. with these movies. If this one tanks making a really bold, creative risk on a brilliant filmmaker, okay, we'll be okay. So that's the one other factor. It doesn't usually play into it, but where you have strength across your slate, you feel you could take some creative risk in other parts of it.

33:08Jim Gianopulos:well what's interesting about what you just described is most of this analysis i assume is done before the movie's even made in any part it's before you spend the dollar well right typically you typically and it's another another thing that it's an old it's an old trick in hollywood where before you get before you actually green light the movie and say okay good here's 100 million go make it you're spending money developing scripts they'll come to you and say we want to book the sets because you may not decide to make it, but if you do decide to make it, we got to make sure we've got these sets because you're going to start in February and we're going to get this.

33:46And what you try and avoid is that there's too much sunk money by the time you have to make the full decision. You learn these tricks over the years. But yes, all of this happens for the most part, other than the development money, before you make the big

34:07Jim Gianopulos:bet, of course. So there's a lot of execution risk on top of everything that you described. Oh, yeah. Yeah. A lot of execution risk, which goes back to who you make in the movie with, how confident, and then, you know, who are the people surrounding them? You know, who's the line producer? Who are the producer producers? Are they capable of managing the project because you know i always uh i always thought about i don't maybe a dumb comparison but i always thought making a movie is is kind of like you know funding columbus so you get to argue with columbus about how much salted pork he's going to get and how much barrels of this he's going to get and all of that and you have all that conversation but at some point He throws the lines off and sails off and you hope he comes back with spices and doesn't get into a hurricane.

35:04So you only have so much control once the movie starts. Obviously, you're constantly on set. You're constantly, and personally, you have people that are constantly monitoring the production and managing it financially and accounting department. but there's a limit to how much you can control, how many takes a director does, whether there are directional changes that happen during the film, normal human stuff, actors get sick or actors get hurt or things happen, rains when it shouldn't, it doesn't rain when it should, things like that.

35:44Jim Gianopulos:There's always some. And you talked about some costs and I'm sure you hit a point of no return at some level as well. Oh, yeah, because we could stop now and have half a movie. What are you going to do with that? Yeah, that's definitely the part of the line cast off. You've got to make sure, hope that ship comes back. But you can't do much with half a movie. And starting over or firing directors, unfortunately, never had to do that. But that's even more costly. So, yeah, you can get into some trouble. And it happens. It happens at every studio throughout the history of the industry. And sometimes you have to make on Top Gun, you know, we did very substantial reshoots.

36:36And Tom Cruise had said to me at the beginning, okay, we're going to do this, Jim, but we're going to do it until it's right. I said, of course, Tom. And after I heard that, I thought, I wonder what he means by that. and and then he said we need more aerial sequences i i don't feel like those sequences are enough we're right and we need to do this and we we really need to reshoot this scene and it was you know it was not an insubstantial amount of money toward the end of the movie but the talent involved in both on the directing side but also tom as a very very active creative element of that movie had already shown us i mean what we had seen was was phenomenal and so we had to take it to the next level and we did and it was worth it and it paid paid off over multiple times but so even sometimes with a with a film that's disciplined and on budget, or at least close to budget, that sometimes makes sense to make a little extra investment to get it to the right place.

37:49Jim Gianopulos:I think that movie in particular surprised a lot of people because it was decades after the original. You'd think, who's going to release a second decades later? But it just came together so remarkably well. Yeah. In fact, the interesting thing was I was at Paramount for the first one. I was working at Paramount, you know, running all of the video and paid television and a bunch of other stuff, and international, all that stuff. Anyways, when we did the first TopCon, and so I had the experience twice, but I mean on different levels. So you talked about the history of the industry, but would you help us understand the evolution of the film industry over the past several decades and where you believe it's headed?

38:36Oh, boy. Well, yeah, firstly, I actually taught a course at USC, just for the fun of it, but that ended up being a lot about this. And part of it is when you look across the history of the industry, there are three or elements that have defined it throughout time. The first, of course, is the creators and the creative aspect, the content. The second is the technology and how that enables those creators to create and to manifest their creation, and also how that content is ultimately experienced and seen. And the third element is the audience and how the audience has what options and choices the audience has about what they see, how they see it, where they see it, and how they decide what they want to see.

39:36And when you look at those three, you can make all kinds of Venn diagrams, but they're always in constant motion. And they're all kind of, I think they're equally important, but technology is often at the center of it all, right? So -

39:52Jim Gianopulos:It connects the two, right? In some ways. It defines both of them, yes. But all the tech in the world is useless if you don't have a Steven Spielberg, or Jim Campbell, or any great director. So yeah, but technology does sort of define it. So when you look at the evolution, it's just a series of disruptions, right? So, you know, you started with silent movies, and just the fact that the picture moved was enough, and then you had sound. And by the way, the one thing that I found throughout the evolution of, and I know we're back more than decades, one thing I found is that not atypically, the incumbents at the time of disruption resisted the disruption.

40:37That's not surprising. Jack Warner famously said, who the hell wants to hear actors talk? So in television, so then you had the evolution of theater going and people were going to the movies a number of times a week because that's how you knew what was going on in the Second World War, you know, because of newsreels, and you got a cartoon, and you got away and got out of the Depression, and found a way to escape, you know, from difficult times in history. So, along comes television, and holy shit, this is the end of civilization. This is going to destroy us. In fact, you know, I came across this thing, MGM, in the beginning of the late 40s and 50s when television came, prohibited any filmmaker from showing a television set in a living room.

41:28They wanted to kill this thing in the crib. They wanted to stop this medium as quickly as possible. And so there was a point when all the studios were on the verge of bankruptcy. People stopped going to the movies. They stayed home, watched Milton Berle. And the studios didn't know what to do until one of them woke up and so some of them woke up and said well wait a second these guys have they show things right we got things we have all these movies that have only once been shown in the theater you think they want to buy all of a sudden there's a gold rush and then they thought well wait a second these guys tell stories on these little television sets we know how to tell stories why don't we make them gold rush same thing again with you with video.

42:16Oh, video's going to kill everything. Turned into multi-hundreds of billions of dollars. And then, of course, the internet. And the internet came pretty close to being destructive for a while. And there were many of us, and I was in the thick of it, going up and having big fights with Google because everybody was just pirating, building these platforms. Not so much Google, but in a way, they were with YouTube. They were just grabbing anything they could do and put it up on the platform and then apologizing later. They were driving us a little crazy. And for the first time, you didn't have to go to some flea market to buy a cassette of the movie.

42:55You just put it on the internet and you could have anything you wanted. And any kid who stole a copy of the movie or copied it in the movie theater put it up in the entire planet. Holy shit, this is the end. And of course, we saw what happened. And so that all evolved. And I think the biggest change has been the devolution of linear television and multi-channel television. The legacy studios have had an absolute bonanza in cable television for a long time. You know, anyone, and most of them did, who had a core must-have network could multiply that with a number of other ancillary networks and get paid for 105 million cable households in the U.S.

43:48Well, that 105 is now, and last time I learned, it's 60 and headed south of 50. So when you look at the decrease of massive flow of revenue that disappeared from the legacy media companies, they're scrambling to try and figure out how to replace it. And then here comes the latest disruptors. You know, my very good friend, Ted Sarandos, one of the smartest, by far, I think, one of the smartest people in the industry. In fact, in the recent history of the industry, just swallowed Warner Brothers. You know, we'll see how it plays out. But he was stuffing envelopes 30 years ago. And then, through genius and innovation and disruption and boldness, went online and said, here, no ads, all the series at once, we're going to go spend, I forget what he spent on House of Lies, House of Lies, the first show he did.

44:56All of a sudden, you had this really bold disruptor who created this platform that was completely unique, different from anything people had ever seen before. You know, a subscription available on the internet with great technology to support it, compression technology, which became like instantly overnight, wow, this is great. To the point where obviously it attracted competitors. Amazon came in and said, we're not going to let them be the only guys in town. So they jumped in and then others jumped in. And so the business transformed. But they built their businesses. And when the industry looks back, they all know it now.

45:43But those platforms, particularly Amazon and especially Netflix, built those platforms on the back of pre-existing content from the legacy studios. and the legacy studio we were the one of the last to take some comfort in that not much we were the last to aggressively license netflix but after a while the money was so great you couldn't say no so all the legacy studios opened up their vaults and licensed a massive amount of their content and in the process made hundreds of millions of dollars many millions of dollars yeah hundreds Then they woke up and said, oh, what do we do? We just created a monster.

46:26We created our competition. Let's pull back and we'll build our own. And by the way, we better build it fast because over on the cable side of the company, that ice cube is melting as fast as it can. So now I need to replace the financial equivalent of over 50 million households paying subscription fees for my cable networks with this streamer I started yesterday. And the streamers at this point are very healthy, many, many hundreds of millions, tens of millions in case of Netflix now 300 million, but even then 150, 200 million subscribers paying$10 a month. pretty soon you got a good war chest they don't need the studio's original content for existing content they just go full bore into original content so now there's a there's a content arms race by the existing uh platforms the existing streaming platform and then the legacy players who came in late and are desperate to catch up fighting this battle of how can we keep up with the deep pockets.

47:44By the way, it's not just the number of subscribers that Prime and Netflix and even HBO. Of course, Disney is a great competitor different from the other legacy a little further along. But they're desperately trying to catch up to the streamers built and run by tech companies who not only have a war chest based on their subscribers, but they're worth ridiculous amounts of money. So anytime they want to fund that arms race, So you can see why the industry has shifted to where the tech guys were welcome visitors in terms of their largesse and their licensing, and who were in the business of, you know what, we don't want to be in this nasty business of taking chances, dealing with all these creators, they're all a pain in the ass.

48:40We'll just license the stuff to now being full bore in it. And so the ground under Hollywood has been shifting now for the better part of a decade, but even just in the past few years, it's gotten shaky. And these companies are facing, understandably, very stiff competition from the folks up north who are very much part of the community. Yeah. So, you know, that's been the evolution. And it's hard. It's hard to keep up that arms race. You know, I think Paramount's, when we launched Paramount Plus, you know, we were one of the last people in. It was tough. We had a massive amount of content, but like zero subscribers.

49:31So, you know, trying to play in that game and say, okay, well, we're going to allocate so much money to build, make content. we're going to forward price this or invest in this was very challenging and has been very challenging. So that's what you're seeing now. And that's one of the reasons why you're seeing so much consolidation in the legacy business of Disney taking over Fox. And now what was going to be Paramount, but ended up being Netflix, buying Warner Brothers because there was a limit, to how well they could sustain, how well they could replace the economics of their pre-existing legacy live action business, a linear business with streaming.

50:23You couldn't build it quickly enough to manage it. And so, you know, and there are other reasons. I think obviously the debt that Mona took on. But so that's what's happened. And I think that it's become sort of, I wouldn't say there may be an existential threat to Hollywood. That may come later in different form. But in terms of the legacy studios, they have been in a very challenged position. The only exception or the main exception is Disney. And of course, Universal has a very wealthy and successful and supportive parent. And as well, Universal has been on a great tear creatively, really well-run business with Donna Langley.

51:11But all of these other businesses, when television challenged theatrical and video challenged theatrical and the internet challenged everything, they were all, not just the creative, They were massively additive to the pre-existing businesses. Streaming has not been that, at least for the existing business. It has not replaced the business. It has not replaced the economics of the business that it put away, which was mainly linear television.

51:46Jim Gianopulos:And how does artificial intelligence factor into all of this in terms of the evolution and where things are headed? I don't think there's a single place that it won't find its way. We're not talking about superintelligence. We're talking about AGI and the capabilities of, but even that is very substantial. You look at Sora as a perfectly capable technology able to replicate. It's still not quite there yet, but the speed of its evolution, the evolution of AI to be able to create acceptable video imagery is basically here and is only going to get bigger or better. So that's shaking the foundations.

52:42And, you know, it really falls into two kinds of categories. One is that there's a fear that it will replace the traditional form of filmmaking where, you know, somebody starts with a blank sheet of paper and writes a script and then figures out how to get it financed and then goes and puts all the pieces together and films it and does all of that and eventually puts it in theaters or on a streamer and all of that. to a machine that does all of that. I think we're still a long way from there. What it will do, however, and its risk and real risk of a lot of really great, hardworking people in the community is a very substantial displacement of many of the routine, and I don't mean lacking in talent, but routine functions.

53:45You know, editing. post-production, special effects, animation. Animation is probably, in many ways, might be the first to go. You know, animated films, several hundred animators to make one of these full-length, you know, Pixar, Disney, or any great animated film. I mean, a lot of those jobs are going to be displaced throughout the production food chain. Many of those tasks will be AI replaced. And that's really sad and really threatening at a time when the industry is already reeling from COVID and from it, the strikes, which in part were meant to avoid the impact I just described, and did so to a degree, but couldn't do it completely.

54:45So that's the bad news. The bad news is it is going to replace and displace a lot of good paying, many cases just good, solid, middle-class, upper-middle-class union jobs that have supported a broad variety of hard-working, good people. And that's that. It's probably here or coming soon.

55:18Jim Gianopulos:If you go back to the three components, the creatives, the technology, and the audience. Right. So the technology is expanding and it's bleeding into the creative side. Exactly. Exactly.

55:59They had Jurassic Park, right? So in the past, it enabled filmmakers, and it will do that again, because there is the other side. And the other side of it is that right now, one of the areas, and talk about the evolution of the business, one of the areas that's most challenged is the theatrical experience. Right now, the movie theater going is about 70 % of what it was before COVID. People got out of the habit of COVID. Streaming was there. They couldn't go out. They couldn't do anything. Maybe buy a little bigger TV, subscribe to Netflix, and you're good to go. Why go to the movies unless it's Avatar, unless it's Wicked, unless it's some huge movie?

56:49so the movie the theatrical experience is challenged and the theatrical infrastructure is challenged at the same time the people willing to take the bet to make i pick any movie other than that's why you see so many sequels because if you're going to spend 150 200 million dollars making a movie you're not as likely to do it on something no one's ever heard of and find out you just lost 100 or even 200. Because by the time you do all the marketing, you could lose the whole thing. So what that's going to do is erode the originality or has the potential to erode the originality and creativity. So what you'll end up seeing is just an endless number of the same

57:39Jim Gianopulos:remakes, sequels. And that has a negative feedback. Well, yeah, because people get tired of that. I saw three. I saw five. I'm not going to 7. People get tired of it and who cares? One of the advantages, and again, to some extent, it comes at the price of hurting hardworking folks in the business, is the efficiencies of it. A filmmaker and a studio can sit together and see the entire film and previs in AI. right i mean you can these tools are now at a place where and they will be at a place where you can envision the entire film with real credible looking actors of course you got to go make it it's not the ai making the film you probably end up shooting it but you have a better sense of where it's working how it's working you'll use it as a tool to enhance your marketing it'll be more efficient in editing post-production special effects.

58:42So is there a time when these tools are so efficient and so enabled creators that you can have a really smart, capable filmmaker who would need$150 million today to make that movie that no studio would finance because see above, it's not a sequel or an obvious thing, but comes back and says, I can make that now for 40, or 30, or 50, or whatever it is. So do those efficiencies eventually, you know, when you take the full benefit of the curve, evolution of the curve, do those efficiencies then lead to a different loop where more movies that wouldn't otherwise have been made get made, more creative and original choices get made, which wouldn't be made because of the being enabled by these technologies, and especially with AI.

59:41So there is that possibility. And of likelihood, actually, I would believe that at some point, these technologies always in the hands of a human being. That's the whole thing that I think needs to be really carefully considered, which is, I don't think a machine, I have a lot of experience with the tech people and with Silicon Valley and all those folks and I have a great deal of respect for them. Some of these AI folks, I'm still waiting, I'm still a little leery of some of the things that I'm hearing and concerned about, especially with superintelligence. But the ability for some of these machines is ultimately limited by the fact that it really takes a human being to convey empathy and happiness and sadness and emotions and infuse a film and infuse a storytelling with those emotions and sensibilities.

1:00:45So ultimately, at the top, at the origin, not just legally, because copyright needs a human being. Guilds will hopefully end up putting even more corrals around artificial contributions to creative output. But at the end, you have human creativity enabled or supported by AI. And then the key is where does the balance end up? If someone was writing a film or making a film about the French Revolution, in the old days, they would go down in the basement of Paramount Pictures and it'd be this massive library of books and magazines and lithographs and all of this stuff to understand what would Paris have looked like at the time of the revolution.

1:01:42Well, now, and then Google came along. Well, that was enabling. You could go look it up, right? with AI, you can see it. Now, that's not bad. That's actually good. That's an enabling tool. I'm just giving one silly example, but that is an example of ways that this enables the creator to decide what direction or how to build a set or how it should look or how this particular the character would be dressed in ways that are just more facile. But again, along the way, set designers, production designers, costumers, you know, it's going to replace some of those tasks. But ultimately, I think the creative process will always be with humans, or it needs to be with humans.

1:02:41And then we have to figure out how to make the most of this without wrecking the entire industry in the process.

1:02:50Jim Gianopulos:Throughout your career, you've supported a closer relationship between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. You've been doing that for a long time. Why did you prioritize that connection? Pretty obvious that these guys, they weren't going away. And certainly at the time of the internet, they were here. It started with trying to keep the piracy at bay. So we did that, and eventually it evolved, and we saw pirated music sites become very successful subscription sites on the internet. So we were hoping and watching for that evolution to move from just taken all the stuff for free to business models that worked.

1:03:36And that's how I ended up getting to know and ended up being very close with Steve Jobs, the launch of iTunes. And Steve at first, you know, spent a lot of time telling me what an idiot I and all the rest of us were, and then started talking about stuff and try to find the way. How do we put movies on iTunes at a price that was well below what you could buy a DVD, but how it made sense. Obviously, you didn't have a lot of the quality. There's a lot of details to that. But at first, it was end the fear, and then it was seize the opportunity. In order to do that, these companies weren't going away.

1:04:21You know, Google wasn't going to shut down YouTube. Steve wasn't going to stop in his mission to redefine the way we experience just about everything. That was truly a privilege to hear him talk about stuff. But yeah, it was a chance to say, okay, wow, this thing is not unlike AI. At first, it was a huge threat. You mean anybody can see the movie the guy posted? Oh, shit, that's bad. to, oh, anybody could see the movie and also buy the movie. I mean, streaming wouldn't exist without the internet and a lot of, especially a few smart people like Ted Saranis, as I mentioned. And Steve was at the heart of it all.

1:05:13The ability, the first time, you know, we came out of a meeting, it was crazy. He came out of a meeting about iTunes, about putting movies then on his platform and on the iPod. And so we battered back and forth. And I said, I'll, you know, we're at Fox. I said, I'll walk you to your car. And he said, oh, great, thank you, okay. We started walking down the hall. And he said, do you want to see something cool? And he pulled out the prototype of the iPhone. and he starts flipping record covers and he's you want to make a phone call watch this do you remember what year that was it was uh was it 10 something i think that's about right to write it the it was just before it was whatever year it was that we gave the first movies to itunes well but i don't know It was very short and not very long before the iPhone.

1:06:22So you look at this and you go, okay, first, these guys are here to stay. Second, the threat can become an opportunity. And inevitably, they are going to be at the heart of or a very important part of the ecosystem by which people will experience our content. So how do you not work with them? Fight them when you have to? But work with them. Right now, YouTube went from stealing all our stuff to eventually we figured out a way to see some money out of it, to right now it is the most watched medium in the industry. More people watch YouTube than Netflix. Forget the networks are ancient history, the dinosaurs now.

1:07:14So you watch this evolution and you look at these technologies and you go, okay, well, this is going to both enable new business models, new opportunities, new ways to disperse our stuff. So Pirate Music Site becomes Spotify. The record companies who were really on their ass all of a sudden overnight are flush. Why? Because they monetize not just their new stuff, but their entire history of music. So you look at those technologies and you say, well, that's what it's capable of. Let's go figure out how to do more of that. So it wasn't genius. It was kind of obvious.

1:07:54Jim Gianopulos:I guess it all goes back to those three components, right? There's the creative, the technology, and the audience. And there's different ways to distribute. Exactly. The audience wasn't going to buy. I remember going into a Virgin Megastore and seeing side by side a, I think it was a Lord of the Rings DVD, which was$14.99. And next to it, a CD of Bozo and the Whoevers. It wasn't a big band. And I'm noted because of what? For$13. I'm thinking, that's a$200 million budget movie that made a billion. And that's a band no one's ever heard of. How long is it going to take the dumbest music lover to say, that's not fair?

1:08:46I'm not doing that. So Steve said, 99 cents. If there's one song from those bozos you like, you can have it. so eventually you know it wasn't just the manner in which audiences experienced content but it was the business models which just seemed more reasonable to them and so you know and what and you know what you're seeing now is now that the the streamers have acclimated people to how cool and how good the stuff is. Every few months or every six months, every year, another dollar, another dollar. When Bob Iger launched Disney Plus at$6.99, I said, I don't know what we're going to do. He's boiling the frog.

1:09:36You get everybody in at$6.99. No one with a kid under 10 is not going to subscribe. Sure enough, they did. And then the service was so good that another dollar here and there, it's okay, fine. And then of course they enhanced their streaming with, in an interesting way, it's not that interesting, it's pretty obvious, but in an interesting way, the disruptor streaming, which said, strip out all the ads, you can just have this subscription service, you don't need to subscribe to cable and have a lot of networks that you never watch, just come here, and you don't see any ads, has now evolved to where, well, you can pay a lot of money or more money and not have ads, or you can pay less money and have ads.

1:10:23Oh, and by the way, if you come here, and it's happening increasingly, you know, if you come to Prime Video, we'll give you this service, that service, and that service for this one price with ads. So how, all overnight, everybody who was complaining about the nature of cable, it's actually being replicated in the bundling of streaming services. So you want to pay more money, but once again, those are the audience choices. You want to pay more money, you don't have to see any ads or have any other service, but if you want more at a lower price, we can give that to you. It's called bundling. And now it actually looks like cable on the internet.

1:11:08It's really what it is.

1:11:09Jim Gianopulos:You made two points that to me stand out. One is the industry has continued to evolve over time. You talked about silent movies and video and internet and so on. And the other point that you made that stands out is the incumbents tend to be slow to evolve. How can legacy studios successfully embrace innovation and technology like AI without losing sight of their core value of storytelling? I think what you have to do, and what I always tried to do, and others that I had emulated or benefited from, was to embrace the technologies. Was to understand that, you know, they're not going away. So I think it's important to embrace the technologies, to find ways to work with them and take the benefit of their efficacy and their benefits.

1:11:57and at the same time be very mindful of talking now about current studios the legacy studios you know tech guys aren't going away you'll have to compete with them in terms of technology embrace it take advantage of its utility always continue to look to the great storytellers and the great filmmakers and the great creative voices, writers and directors and talent on screen, in front of the camera, behind the camera, always look to those humans because they're the ones who are going to make the most acceptable and successful and valuable entertainment experience. and then utilize the tech, but figure out how to put guardrails.

1:12:49Have some self-discipline about the manner in which you approach it. Support legislation that prevents deep fakes, which is happening in the industry. Work with the guilds. There's always been an antagonistic relationship, or at least an adversarial at times relationship with the guilds, usually about money. At this point, it's, okay, we have to join together to make sure that these things don't get out of hand. You're on the same team. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's being mindful of the technologies that don't disappear. I mean, if they're bad, they disappear. But some of these technologies aren't going anywhere.

1:13:33So figure out how to use them effectively and always be respectful of the human element.

1:13:40Jim Gianopulos:And I suppose in some ways it's like a compromise, right? You accept the things that are great and then you compromise some areas and you don't give up on others and that's how you move forward. You have a lot of talented people at risk of being displaced. Figure out how to convert them to people who can utilize these technology tools so that you have the benefit of their expertise and their talent. And also, frankly, you know, you avoid having to lay off or fire a whole lot of people. Figure out how to take advantage of people who have been making movies and television successfully, making content successfully for a long time.

1:14:21repurpose them, help them, give them these tools, and provide them with opportunities to utilize them. Now, you may not need as many of them. That's just maybe a sad reality, but at least don't displace everyone overnight when you can have them be an adjunct

1:14:39Jim Gianopulos:to an efficient technology. I'm sure there's tremendous value and insight in their experience that it's hard to just replace by a computer. Exactly. Yeah. So that's an important element, I think. The last question I'm going to ask you is about your legacy. How do you hope your legacy will be in Hollywood? And what advice would you share with the next generation of studio leaders? I would like to think that I treated people with respect, both inside the companies that I worked for and the ones that I ran, and externally. That I made a contribution to the industry that, both in promoting its talent and its art, you know, made some good decisions along the way.

1:15:27Can be hopefully forgiven for the ones that didn't work. A few decent movies. A few decent movies, and let's forget about some of those others. It seemed like a good idea at the time. and that I did so with gratitude and maybe some measure of grace.

1:15:48And, yeah, that I was good, at least decent at what I did, and that I left a mark and I left something behind. You know, I think for future leaders, recognize, as I think I did, I felt it, that you're privileged to hold a unique position. You know, this is an incredible opportunity to run a studio, but it also comes with an obligation. It comes with an obligation to the past and an obligation to the future for the studio that you lead. You know, you're the custodian of its heritage. So respect that, You know, and yeah, it comes with all kinds of privileges and you probably make a bunch of money, but respect the fact that you're in a very privileged position.

1:16:44And also respect the fact that you're called the chairman because you're sitting in the chair. Someone sat there before you and someone's going to sit there after you. So don't take yourself so seriously. And ultimately, make great shit and don't be an asshole.

1:17:06Jim Gianopulos:Pretty simple. Simple advice. And I guess don't forget the 10-year-old in you that's in awe of the theater and the movies. I still remember some of them, including the ones I had zero business watching. Anyway, that's it. Jim, this has been great. I appreciate you sharing all your experience and insights with us. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please visit our website at insightfulinvestor.org to access past shows and learn more about our podcast. If you have questions, feel free to email us at info at insightfulinvestor.org.

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