Barry Diller

0:01Tetragrammaton.

0:24When I was a kid, there were three television networks. There was a rotary dial that you turned to get these three video television choices. And over the next 20, 30 years, we saw first a number of cable stations came into being. And then I remember being at a cable convention in, I think, the early 70s, where John Malone, a great cable pioneer, was on the stage and said, there will be a 500-channel universe, cable universe. And that was the first time anyone said it. And you may recall this, the 500-channel universe, which for about a decade after was the reference point. And, of course, how overly true that is.

1:28We have way more than that. If you take YouTube, et cetera, we have thousands and thousands of, quote, channels, close quote. So I've seen this evolution of enormous scarcity, basically three places that you could view things, to what we have today. All of that has not, though, changed the essential nature of, call it mass communication media, which is when you got an idea and then you can execute it, make it, whether it's a television series or a movie or whatever. While the distribution methods have changed, the form factor may have changed, but the form hasn't changed. It's still storytelling.

2:13It's always going to be storytelling of one form or the other. Has the fact that it went from the three networks to now maybe unlimited possibilities changed anything? It hasn't changed the essence of what I just said. I mean, what it has changed, probably to me the most important change is how fast it disappears. How little that affects the culture stays in the culture. That because there's so much that it comes and goes in a flash. I mean, I'm so, for my friends, and just empathy for others, when I see a film that I know people worked on for close to a year, and it's gone in two days. I mean, the work you go into to do this stuff, this is intensive work.

3:14And that it's gone in a flash. And even things that have, except for big, huge Bonanza ticket items like current Wicked, let's call it, or Barbie, that take over for a couple of months. Almost everything is just gone too quickly and does not resonate. That's the greatest change from when I was growing up and I began to participate, for instance, in making Roots, a kind of seminal television miniseries that was, I think, 22 hours, two hours over a night over 11 nights and captured more than half the United States and stayed in the culture for months and months and months. It changed the world. Everyone saw Roots and people still reference it today.

4:03Yeah. So the ability to do that today. So I think that's, to me, the biggest change is that really worthy stuff, not worthy, stuffed that's great in any form of worthiness or not, just simple great, just doesn't resonate anymore is sad, among other things. I think it's this whole thing of gathering around the family, around the television set. I mean, it's such a lovely image, and it's so ludicrous to even imagine it today. Yeah. Tell me the story of the miniseries. Not Roots, but in general, there was a time when there were no miniseries. This is true. That time was in the late 60s, early 70s.

4:53Yeah, I think it's probably—no, it is early 70s. We'd started this thing called The Move, The Week, and we had, I think at its height, we made 75 of them a year, 90-minute movies. Unbelievable. And I had thought when I would read a really good, thick, juicy fiction book, I would think, why do they make a two-hour movie of this stuff? I mean, how do you compress? It's almost impossible. So I thought, you know, here we got this thing, television thing. It's on all the time. We've got nothing but time. So why not try and tell a story in how long it takes to tell that story? We didn't have a word called miniseries.

5:35We had the word we invented, which is called a novel for television. Nice. First of all, I thought I got to get a book to do this with. And no one would sell me books because they were all sold to movies at the time. And there was no form of this for television. So the only book I could buy was QB7, which was the story essentially of castration and during Nazi Germany. A tough subject to be sure. And I thought, well, okay, it's all I got. And so we hired, thankfully, Anthony Hopkins to play the lead. And it was four hours. We put it on over two nights. And it was a big hit. And that was the first one.

6:18During the production of it, I got a hold of a second book called Rich Man, Poor Man, a much more popular, first of all, novel and also a great cracking story. And we made that quickly thereafter, probably a year or two, I guess. And that was 12 hours. And thus the miniseries was born. While we were doing Rich Man, Poor Man, Alex Haley came to my office with David Wolper, a major producer at the time, and told me that he was in the middle of writing this book called Roots. And he hadn't finished writing the novel. And I think I had only an outline. But in the office on that day, I said, we're definitely doing this.

7:06I don't know that we bought it that day, but we bought it within an hour. Wow. And then he took him a while to finish the book, and then we made it. Actually, Genesis of what became known as the miniseries. Once you had success doing miniseries, did the other networks copy? Oh, yes, absolutely. Everybody copied it. Why did it take you to see that you could make something longer? It's like it was just a different model. Why did you see that and no one else could see it? Thankfully, I did. And if it's not true of anything that seems very obvious, look, it was so natural to me. I mean, and it didn't develop like a bolt in my little dumb head of let's do this.

7:52But over, you know, over, I don't know, a gestation period of being a little frustrated by this 90-minute movie, which was really 75 minutes of actual film. but more so seeing novels butchered when they were made into movies, which was the only way that novels got translated. And then, of course, I knew the great maw of television had unlimited time to do anything. Yeah. It wasn't that hard to do. But then, you know, I think the same thing. After I saw Steve Jobs demo the iPhone, I don't know if you saw that original demo. I did. I saw it before I got the product. I thought, this is frigging magic.

8:39And now you think, what a simple idea, a form factor in your hand that you could interface with. Content. Anyway, I think that's true of most ideas. Tell me the story of the movie of the week. Well, I'm 24, a little over 24, I think. and I had been responsible at ABC for buying movies from major studios to show on the networks and I realized that there weren't enough movies to buy. The movies that were being made were basically divided between the three networks and it was hard to get new product. They weren't making enough of it, so to speak. So I thought, oh, why don't we make our own? Which was a lunatic idea.

9:34It's a radical, radical idea. And I thought the 90-minute form was good for television for a lot of reasons, scheduling reasons really, particularly an ABC schedule at the time. And luckily, the chairman of ABC had come from the movie business. and he was the only one actually, but it was the only one necessary really, that allowed it to get a little spark to start the development process. And then because everybody thought it would fail because the only thing on television then was these half hour, an hour television series, they let this 24-year-old kid, me, actually do it. So I got from the very first day the responsibility without anyone actually bestowing it on me.

10:26I kind of just took it. No one said anything otherwise. Again, I think they wanted to stay away from it. And so I got to build a little movie studio inside this network from the scratch up. I mean, it was the seminal experience of learning how to manage because at the very beginning of any project, basically you really have to do every job because you're hiring every job so you kind of learn every job yeah it gives you the great foundation for being able to manage stuff so it was kind of a miracle and then when it succeeded it succeeded with such moment that by 26 I think they made me the first youngest vice president in television history, and no one could take it away from me.

11:20And was that really based on the breakthrough of the movie of the week and making them yourself? Yes, yes, totally. It's a great idea. We made the process of building an entity that actually manufactured, made 24 movies at the first season. We made 24. And then the second season, we went to a second night, so we made 50. And then the third, we made 75. I mean, it was, yeah, a giant manufacturing challenge. It's unbelievable. Considering the big movie studios, none of them made 75 movies a year. No, they made 20. Yeah, it's a huge undertaking. Yeah, it was. It was total fun. There's a wonderful thing about, I think, people presuming you're going to fail is that they leave you alone.

12:12And so you kind of are in isolation and protected by that because nobody kind of wants to get near you, which means you get to make your mistakes and correct your mistakes really without anybody banging around and trying to alter your course in their way.

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14:54Describe ABC versus the other two networks in those days. Well, ABC was the hip shooter network because it was the third network. It was the youngest network. Since they commandeered the entire viewing population, CBS and NBC had been founded in radio days, 25, 30 years, yeah, before television. And so they were very established. And ABC came along, strung together from wire coat hanger television stations. So in order to land itself, it had to take more chances than the more established networks. Also, while it was a large company, it didn't have very much bureaucracy. Yeah. Get successful and you get established.

15:51Barnacles start to form and bureaucracy is inevitable. But because it had little bureaucracy, if you wanted responsibility, you could just take it. There was no one there to stop you. It was kind of run like a candy store. And what an incredible opportunity it was for those of us who got to participate in it in those years, these years being the late 60s to 74 when I left it to go to Paramount. Tell me about that decision to leave. It wasn't a decision. I didn't really want to go. It was crazy. It is. What happened? Now, there was nobody at that time from television who was allowed into the theatrical motion picture business.

16:31I mean, as I used to say, they used to pee on the people from television. Definitely not even second-class citizens, according to the very, very concentrated movie business, divided at that time among six studios and no one else. And this mad Austrian who ran a company called Gulf and Western, a big conglomerate at the time, had bought Paramount. And I had gotten to know him because I had been buying these movies, as I said earlier, these theatrical movies for television, and I'd gotten to know him. And he'd been trying to get me to come to Paramount for, I don't know, four or five years, and I kept saying, no, I don't want to do that.

17:17Various, you know, run the television department of Paramount, et cetera. And one day he called me over to his office and said, all right, I'm going to make you chairman of Paramount. I said, well, that's insane. You can't make me chairman of Paramount. I'm like a middle-level ABC executive. He said, well, I guess what? I am doing it. I said, well, I don't know that I want to do it. He said, well, then you are insane. and true he told me and i said i have to think about this think about it i mean just say yes you bird brain eventually of course after a day or so i came to my senses and i said yes and so i became chairman of paramount at the age of 32 unbelievable and i was the first person from television that dared to come into the movie business how was the reception in the industry to this outsider Not kindly.

18:12And, of course, since for me, the only process I know is kind of fail first before I can figure it out and make my way. Yeah. So for the first couple of years, I mean, epitomized by my favorite worst movie we made, which was called Wanton Ton, the dog that saved Hollywood. And not only did it not save Hollywood, it sunk without a trace. and we made a lot of turkey movies in those first two years as I was trying to figure out this movie business that, again, everybody snobbly didn't want to have anything to do with me. And at the time, most of the movie business was dominated by packages where agents would put together writer, director, actors in a package and sell them to, quote, the highest bidder or whatever.

19:05And I didn't like that process because I, coming from this manufacturing process on the movie of the week, to me, it was always about what was the idea and then developing it into a script. And when you like the script, then you proceed step by step. And I liked that development process. That was very much against the rules of the movie business. Anyway, I started working on that after I got my first few dunkings into the world of very flamboyant Hollywood at the time, outsized personalities from what was hardly an ancient regime, but the relatively staid world of television. And I started to develop material.

19:58I just felt more comfortable in that process. But it took a while, a little over two years. And, I mean, Paramount, we were the last ranked company, and that was a miserable time. I went to the company that owned the man who'd hired me, and I said, you know, you've taken this great leap of faith, and it's failed, and you want to get on with it and get someone in here that can do better than I've done. And he said, just go back to your office. I'm not letting you out of here. And a few months later, we released Saturday Night Fever and went from last place to first place and held it for seven years.

20:45Wow. Was Saturday Night Fever the first film that really broke out? It was the first big film. We released a film a few months before that. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, based upon a wonderful, slim little book. That was in September, October of, I guess, 76, 77 or whatever. And at Christmas, we released Saturday Night Fever. And after that, a whole string of very successful movies. How did Saturday Night Fever come about? It was a story in New York Magazine. I just thought this is a lovely little short story. And we wrote the script and Robert Stigwood, he was a great impresario of those decades. He started as the Beatles manager, I think, after Brian Epstein died.

21:41And then he went on many record companies, et cetera, et cetera, all in the recorded music business, I think. until he got interested in the film business. And I don't quite know how he got involved with this project, but he did. And what he brought to it, again, this was just a story, but he brought the Bee Gees to it, kind of midway in the development of it. And kind of the first marriage of kind of a movie business and recorded music business. And the Bee Gees track was such a phenomenon. And we released the first or second track, Staying Alive, I think two, three weeks before the movie came out.

22:35Everybody said, well, no one's going to go see a movie with some television guy, John Travolta in that case, in the lead who had been in a television series called Welcome Back, Connor. I said, no, no, no, no, television, that'll never work. And the first hour of the first day, there were lines around the block, many blocks long, because between the music and then the movie itself, it was the definition of a smash. Tell me about the decision to put John Travolta in. I know he was big on television, but up until that point, no one had made that crossover from TV to the big screen. No, no, he was definitely the first.

23:13And it was, again, for us, me and my colleagues, some of whom had then joined the company, particularly Michael Eisner, who went on to run Disney's, you know. And we knew Travolta from television, clearly. And the part was so perfect for John. It was just so obvious to us to put him in it. We didn't think twice about it. And everyone around us said, in the old hands of the movie executives, said, that's crazy. So don't do that. You know, let's get some established person to play this part. And we thought otherwise. And yeah, it really broke through. Do you think you just didn't have the baggage of the old way of doing things gave you freedom to do things other people wouldn't do?

24:04Don't you think that's always true? People think you're going to fail, so you get to do stuff. Yeah. You know, history and experience is good for certain things, but I've always thought too much experience is very bad for new stuff. Yeah. And I've fought against the corrosion of cynicism all my life because I know that what kills instinct is cynicism. And if you gain experience, you can't help but develop a cynical attitude unless you force scrubbing it almost every day. You have to hold on to naivete because it's only if you have kind of naive sensibility that's not knowing, that's not just held down by conventional or current thinking.

25:01That's when stuff springs free. It's always been a fight with me to fight off cynicism and sophistication in certain areas. I'm certainly, after having lived a while, to say the least, no one could say I'm not sophisticated. No one can say I don't live a, quote, big city life. At the same time, I've tried very hard to keep scrubbing it in my exalted circumstances, scrubbing it as clean as I can to keep my instincts at least somewhat fresh. Let's talk about instincts a little bit. When you hear an idea and you know it's a good idea, what's the feeling of good idea versus bad idea? Well, there is a thing called pure instinct.

25:54If you're very lucky, and I am very lucky, I think, in this regard, that my mainstream interests, I've got a lot of little curiosity byways, but my mainstream interests, they've always been in the general mainstream. Why that is, who the hell knows. I'm not overly intellectualized about extremely artistic, arcane, abstruse arenas. So that's pure luck. And then my instincts derive from that. I trust. So when I hear an idea, it either bounces off something that says, now that's interesting or not. And what then additionally affects it is my arguing it with other people in a room, my process of creative conflict, which is you get a bunch of people in an enclosed space, usually past their point of endurance.

27:02and you talk about ideas and what you want to do and different aspects of that. And out of that, you hear kind of people's passion. And that really helps your instincts to get kind of soldered into something that you can then activate. You can then say, yes, let's go in that direction. And it is a process where, A, you listen to your own instincts, but, B, you have a tuning fork inside your head that when you hear a truth in the room, you hear it and you can act on it. And if you didn't provide the coarseness of this creative conflict, I mean, maybe you would, but in my experience, that's where those things come from.

27:53So that's kind of how it works. Is it as simple as the best debater in the room, their ideas win? Or might the best idea come from someone who doesn't explain it so well, but you can hear through that? Oh, yeah. You're totally right about that. First of all, the one thing I think is necessary to establish in that room is when someone says something stupid is you celebrate it. because you got to hear dumb stuff in order to hear good stuff. Yeah. And often it comes from pure passion. When you hear passion, when you hear that, you're hearing a different kind of truth because passion is a kind of truth if you're tuned right.

28:44Yeah. And I don't think any of this comes from deep brain work. Smarter doesn't get you there. I just think that that's a very good creative process. Yeah. And as you say, it's not an intellectual process. I guess it's an emotional thing. It is. You said early when you were describing it, you said past the point of endurance. And it's an interesting idea that something happens when you talk about an idea for too long where your guard comes down out of exhaustion. It's true. And really good, unusual ideas appear that wouldn't appear otherwise, almost in like a dreamlike state. It's very weird. I've always wondered about it, but it's been so true.

29:35is that past the point of interrances, that space doesn't last forever because, you know, exhaustion does come, but whatever. Complete exhaustion where you're inoperable. But there is a time when everyone wants to leave the room and you won't let them. That that next period, stuff happens. Yeah. Maybe it comes out of desperation in some way. Probably. But it works. Well, it's true. I'll tell you where it is most to me in advertising. You know, I've always thought that the best advertising comes out of denial. Explain. Well, when you're on anything that you want to market, let's just say it's an ad.

30:21It's an old parlance, a print ad or any kind of thing that's visual. And I discovered this really with movies where every year you're putting out at Paramount, we were generally doing 15 to 18 movies a year, major movies a year. So twice a month or so, you'd get ready to market a movie. And they would bring in your marketing department, advertising department, bring in different examples of ads. And the normal process is, okay, you get presented five and you pick one. My process was to say, no, all five are bad. Come back. because you don't have to argue a good ad there. It's clear instantaneously to everyone.

31:15And the amount of rationalization that goes on to point out different aspects, whatever, is just wasteful. But if you just deny and keep it up till something comes that's good, And obviously in your denial of it and you say, no, this is not right because of this or that or it'll spark an idea for something or a direction or an avenue to explore or whatever. And I've always thought that what most particulates call them creative ad agencies want to do, they want to go home. They want whatever they've done to be accepted so they can go home, get on to the next thing or whatever. if you just say not good enough.

32:03Yeah. Actually, out of anger, frustration, and whatever else, out often pops a good thing for you to do. So this thing of denial and exhaustion and all is wrapped up in creativity, at least for me. Yeah. It also sounds like you're not as interested in checking something off the list of things to do as getting it right. Well, yeah, and getting it right. Listen, there's a handful of times. It is a handful, a few handfuls maybe. And I can recall some of them where it's just perfect from the first hour of the first day where it comes in. That's the rarest of rare. Usually you've got to work for it.