From Dreamer to Doer: Who Better Than You? Movie Producer, Will Packer on How to Build Success and Resilience in life.

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1:35who's better than you that's the book written by will packer who has been producing some of my favorite movies since he was practically a teenager he produced straight out of compton he produced girls trip with former podcast guest tiffany haddish starring in it and he's produced a ton of other movies against impossible odds how did he build the confidence what were some of his crazy stories. Here's Will Packer to describe the whole thing.

2:08This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show.

2:25No, no. Are you in Atlanta? Yeah. Nice. Normally I am. What are you working on? Other than the book, I got a couple of features that we're working on that we're very close to getting our final green light on for this summer. I'm working on a new television show that we'll shoot hopefully in the fall. So a movie for Universal, television show for Amazon. I just launched a new unscripted show. I'm on my 10th season of a dating show. It's actually the longest running black dating show on television called Ready to Love. It's on Oprah's network on OWN. 10th season. How do you make like a reality dating show stand out?

3:12It's hard. I mean, you know, the answer is the people, but also the formatting matters, the approach that you take to it. You know, at the end of the day, shows around love and people who are desirous of love and finding love, they do very well. if you've got interesting people that are willing to be like open and genuine and honest and all the things. So I think we got that with this show. Let's say someone wants to pitch you like a movie or a TV show. What is the spark that says, ah, I got to do this? You know what? Okay, so when I'm thinking about whether or not I'm going to take on a project, one of the things I do is I always identify the who and the why.

3:55who is who it's for and i'm very specific about that james i'm very like hey what tell me exactly the person that is going to circle the date on the calendar when they hear about this project that is going to say okay you know what i'm stopping the other stuff i'm streaming i'm going to get the babysitter i'm going to the theater wherever whatever medium this is going to be presented in, this is for me, right? In today's environment, because there's so much content, it's totally oversaturated. You got to have an audience that literally owns the content. So that's number one. And I'm very specific about that.

4:34I say, okay, name them. Like, what do they look like? How many kids they got? Where do they work? Like, what's their name? Like, give me this fictional demographic for the person that is going to come out for this show. And if I can't immediately imagine Sharonda with two and a half kids who works at the CVS pharmacy and, you know, does yoga on the weekend and cycles on Sundays, but only every other Sunday because in between she goes to church. If I can't think of that exact person, I go, Sharonda is going to love this movie. It is for her. She's all about it. Then I don't have a who. I don't have a specific demographic.

5:09it. And by the way, I then think about the development of the project very specifically around that audience that I'm making it for, right? Who's the cast that they want to see? What are the plot points that are going to move them? What are the other elements that are going to be important to them? The why is the why now. There's so many great ideas out there, so many great true stories, but why, right? Why? Why does this story absolutely have to be told now? And if you don't hit that bar, you don't hit that very specific, this is who the audience is, and this is the why, the why now, then as a producer, it's too hard to get these things made.

5:45It's too hard to get every single project. I don't care if it's big, if it's small, television, film, doesn't matter. It's so hard to get these things over the hill. But if you don't have that why and that who, it's not for me. It's not something that I can take on. I love this concept of naming your audience. Like you talk about Sharonda in the book. You talk about Corey for, I forget which movie it was, maybe Ride. Ride Along. It was Cody. It was Cody. It's my white guy in Miami. Cody. Young teenager who hangs out at the mall. I remember. That's right. Yep. Yep. And that works for almost anything, like a book or a business or anything.

6:23Oh, anything where you're expending resources where you are consumer-facing, where you need people to come in and support it. You need to very specifically identify your audience. And I do. I literally make up a fictional person because then it personifies who I'm going after. It's not just, oh, I'm going after, you know, young African-American teens in Indiana. You know what I mean? No, I want to be very specific about who that person is. And then I craft a whole narrative around them. I think you got to do that. I don't care if you're opening a coffee shop or a gas station or an online clothing retail store.

7:01Identify that person because then you're thinking about every decision you're making with that person in mind, that fictional person that you have created. But you give them life. You personify it. Now you've got an audience and a demographic that you can almost like debate with. You bandy back and forth your ideas and you go, nope. You know what? Cody's not going to like that. That's not the way to go. But how does it work? like let's say i'm pitching you an idea or a script i wrote and uh do you already have in mind like the next movie you want to do what kind of what your what your audience is what your audience's person is or are you thinking of it as you're looking at pitches no as i'm as as you bring in a pitch to me i'm thinking as you're talking who the who and the why who is this for you would be very surprised at how often when somebody is pitching a project in Hollywood, the who is themselves.

8:00The who is the writer or the producer or director who says, I think this is cool. I want to see this. That's never a good enough reason. Sometimes if you're making art for art's sake, but if you're making it with the economic imperative of you're trying to get a financier to fund it, and that's largely the business that I'm in, is making commercial projects. I have to make them for X, and then they have to make Y. Y needs to be bigger than X. If you're in that business of content creation, then it's not enough that the creator, the writer, the person behind the idea, the ideator thinks it's cool.

8:42That's not enough. So you're pitching me, James. I'm going, all right, who? Who is in it? Who is the person that is going to, and who is the group of people that is represented by this person, should clarify that, because it's that one person personifies a group of people, right, that we're making this thing for. We got to identify that who. And you've got to, typically, that who will tell you what you should spend on the project. Because generally, that demographic, if you say, okay, that demographic is coming out strong, then that's your core audience. So for your core audience, because very few things these days are for everybody, right?

9:23Four quadrants, we used to call them. Hitting every single demo. Young, old, male, female, all the ethnicities covered. Very few projects appeal to everybody because now everybody has an option for what they want. Whatever you're into, somebody's making it for you out there. So you got to make sure that the economics line up with whatever that core audience is. and the creator, the ideator, that ain't enough. And then the why, that's the urgency, right? Why is the story gotta be told now? Because if it's something that people can wait on, they're going to wait. And if they can wait, if you got something that's good out there, but it's like, I don't have to see it right now, they can wait, then typically, not only are they gonna wait, but they're never gonna see it because there's too much stuff out there right now.

10:09Okay, so two questions. Let's say you have a movie that is the best, Like Girls Trip, that did over$100 million, right? I don't know what the final box office was. And let's say Sharonda was your imaginary audience to watch Girls Trip. Why don't you now do every movie for Sharonda, make every movie for Sharonda? Well, I've made multiple movies for Sharonda for sure. But Sharonda's complex, right? Every movie that has, let's say Tiffany Haddish, who you had on your show, who's an amazing, incredible actress with an incredible brand. Every movie she's in will not necessarily work for Sharonda because Sharonda's got tons of options out there.

10:54So you got to really make each one bespoke for that audience. And so the answer of, well, why don't you just make every movie for Sharonda? James, that's what Hollywood tries to do. That's literally the model of Hollywood is a reactive industry. You find something that works and then you repeat it a trillion times. And then audiences go, you're just giving us the same shit over and over again. That's why that doesn't work. And so you have to make sure each time that you're making something, even if it's for the same demographic, you got to approach it in a different way. It's got to be new and fresh because they've already gotten Girls Trip, let's say.

11:27Right? They got Girls Trip. So you can't just come out with another Girls Trip under a different name. It's got to be something about different because they've already seen Girls Trip. So what's the next thing? What's the evolution of that that's going to appeal to that audience? And let's just take Girls Trip as an example. why girls trip then in like 2012, whatever it was, or no, sorry, 2016, 2017. Why girls trip then? Like what was special about it for that time? I think it was a couple of things. One, and probably the biggest thing is something that's a secret of my success, is that a lot of people think that I'm always trying to make things for underserved demographics.

12:12And that's not incorrect, but that's missing the point. What I'm really trying to do is make under-delivered experiences, right? So I am trying to create content that shows authentic, inclusive, because my projects, even with a girls trip that stars for African-American females, it wasn't just for African-American females. My second biggest demo was Caucasian women. for that movie. And it's because it was inclusive, because it had universal storylines that no matter what you look like, whether you saw yourself in the actors on the screen or not, you could relate to some aspect of that film because it was intended to be universal, universal subject matter.

12:59But that experience was an under-delivered experience in a theatrical marketplace. That's what I was going after. That movie took an actual event. There was this actual music festival that happens every year in New Orleans. And it's called the Essence Music Festival because it was sponsored and started by Essence Magazine. And the genesis of Girls Trip is because I went to that festival. I had been multiple times before as a married man. I got a divorce from my first wife, went as a single, newly single guy, and met my current wife at that festival. Because that festival is an amazing, first of all, it's a good time, a lot of music, a lot of fun, revelry, the whole thing, all the good things a festival has.

13:49But it also happens to have a lot of single African-American women at this festival. So, insert newly single Will Packer, I was like, I'm going to Essence, let's go, right? And I did, and I met my wife there. So the fact that it was an authentic event that actually happened that had never been portrayed in this way, that made it an underdelivered experience. Also, this idea of having women who were behaving badly, and I'll put that in quotes because they were just behaving like people. But they weren't there doing the things that you typically see, you know, had up until in that around that same time, excuse me, around that same time, bridesmaids was the project that had gotten a lot of a lot of attention because you had these bridesmaids that were behaving the same way that groomsmen act right around the wedding.

14:47and they were doing all those kinds of crazy, wild things. You didn't see women do that a lot. Well, you especially hadn't seen African-American women do that because there was this perception that black women didn't want to see themselves that way. And I had this feeling that black women wanted to see themselves authentically, whatever that meant, the good, the bad, the ugly, warts and all. They wanted to just see real, real people. And so that's what we showcased there. That was undelivered. That actual festival was undelivered. And then because we had a great team between the writers and the director, my buddy, Malcolm Lee, who directed that, and Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver, who wrote the project together, all those elements came together to present to present this authentic experience that then played beyond that core audience of my Sharondas.

15:40And so that was a huge success. Was that your biggest success up to that point? um no i don't i think ride along actually made more um it's a big success definitely ice cube kevin hart i executive produced straight out of compton i think straight out of compton was before i have to look at the timeline now it's all kind of running together but it's definitely top five for sure one of my top five most successful projects take a quick break if you like this episode. I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at AlcatraGmail.com and tell me why you subscribed.

16:24Thanks.

16:33Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing there, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

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18:23Now, straight out of Compton, you don't really mention it in the book. That's one of my all-time favorite movies ever. Like, how did that one, what's your involvement in that? Like, how did that come about? Yeah, I was an executive producer on that project. So when you're a producer, you're hands on from like the ground up. Typically, if you're doing your job the way it's supposed to be done, you know, Girls Trip, for instance, I you know, that was my idea because I had had that experience where I met my wife at that festival. with Straight Outta Compton that team largely was in place you had an incredible director in F.

19:00Gary Gray who grew up during that time period in that world he was the perfect person to make it clearly you had Ice Cube and Dr. Dre who were still living and then you had Easy E's Estate and I had a relationship with the studio who ultimately financed that project and so I was helpful in being a conduit Film is, it takes a village and it is a collaborative medium and everybody has a role to play. But my role in that one was much more supervisory and in helping to pull the elements together as opposed to being in an execution role. And so interestingly enough, when we were shooting Ride Along 2, the same, it was at the same time that Straight Outta Compton was being filmed.

19:49And we were shooting Ride Along 2 between Miami and Atlanta, and Straight Outta Compton was being shot in Los Angeles. And so we would be on set, and I was on set primarily in Atlanta and Miami on Ride Along 2 with Ice Cube. And I remember we would be on set, and Ice Cube, we would have these iPads, and they would be showing us the live footage of what was being shot in L.A. and in between takes, Ice Cube, while he's got to like know his lines and act against crazy Kevin Hart and be the consummate straight man, which he is, he would then watch as the definitive story of his life and his group was being filmed in LA.

20:36By the way... Played by his son. By the way, it was his son's debut, his big screen debut for his son by the way his son was playing him and i would go to cube and i would be like this is such a mind fuck like how are you keeping all this straight like and then it would be like okay we're ready for you on set cube and then he's got to go and jump into the character and ride along too and i learned a lot about compartmentalization from ice cube because he would say hey i can only control what i can control i gotta keep my eye on whatever the main thing is in front of me at that time. And so that's what he was doing.

21:17And he would watch it and he would give some notes to his son or give some notes to F. Gary Gray or whoever was shooting in LA. And then he'd come back. He'd be in the character in Atlanta. And then he would do that scene. And so I was like, it's amazing. And I'm a good compartmentalizer. But the way he was able to do that with everything, it would have made my head explode. Most people, I think. But he did an excellent job. And I realized he was just staying focused on whatever was right in front of him at that time. And that's what we got to do, man. We get, especially right now, right? Shit is so loud.

21:50It's a loud world in which we live. There is always something vying for your attention. Somebody's watching this right now and their phone is dinging with notifications and something's happening on another screen somewhere, another device, and music is playing and stuff is going on, right? Rainbows and unicorns flying around the room. At the end of the day, that stuff is just sucking the energy out of you. It's just draining. It's just pulling your attention away. And that is pulling your attention away from the main thing. And so that main thing, whatever that is, is suffering because of all these other things that are vying for your attention.

22:28If we can stay focused, and this is something that you have to practice. It's a muscle that you can get stronger with. But if you can stay focused and keep the main thing the main thing, you will get further in your progression of whatever the goal is that you're trying to hit and trying to make. Lessen the distractions. A lot of it's optional. A lot of it is things that we can control. We can control the level of how many notifications you're getting on your phone, right? What's in the background while you're trying to focus on a particular thing? We can control these things, but oftentimes we choose not to.

23:03You feel like you're going to miss out. No. What you're going to miss out on is being able to progress on your main goal faster. So keep the main thing, the main thing, there'll be time for the other stuff. We all try to do too much in the way of multitasking and what happens, because we're not amazing compartmentalizers like an Ice Cube, and we're draining the focus from what it should really be on. You know, you're giving Ice Cube a lot of credit, but I would say the main, the job of a movie producer or a TV producer or whatever is to multitask. Like you have to bring together the cast, the writing, standard budget, figure out all the sets, locations, make sure the schedule's made, make sure the marketing happens.

23:45You know, you describe a little bit of it when you're chasing down Kevin Hart for when he's, you know, in one of your first big movies and he's off going to New York to film his special. Like you have to, your job is to multitask. So nobody else has to multitask as much during a movie. How do you keep yourself focused in these critical times? Yeah, that is very true. That is, you know, when people ask what the job of a producer is, you know, I say it's like being the biggest project manager you can imagine, right? I always use the analogy of the Oscars. You see all these awards that are given to best actor, best sound, best wardrobe, best writer.

24:27And at the end of the night, the last award goes to best picture and the producer gets the best picture award. And I use that because the producer was responsible for pulling together all those other categories. So that's an apropos analogy for what a producer does. And you're absolutely correct. And the answer to the question is, you keep the main thing the main thing, right? Because as a producer, I always say, I never get a call and somebody is saying, we just want to let you know everything's going great, right? You just don't get that call as a producer. You never get the, hey, I just want to let you know over here on this set, everybody's good.

25:06The actors are happy. We're on time. We're on schedule. We're on budget. Just letting you know. Nobody ever does that because they don't have time. because they're putting out fires. Because when things are going good, you focus on the good stuff and you only call the producer to come in when stuff is going wrong. So what happens is you end up getting a lot of calls of fires burning. As a producer, your job is always to put out the biggest fire. Whatever the fire, whatever it is that needs your attention the most, that's the main thing. You get that under control. You may not even be able to put it out.

25:43And this is life. This is how a lot of people have to figure out how to juggle their lives, right? Kids, marriage, job, entrepreneurial endeavor, new challenge we're trying to pivot to. What is the thing that needs your attention the most at that time? Then that's the main thing. And you keep the main thing the main thing. That's my job as a producer. That's my approach. I also, I have an electrical engineering degree. So one of the things I think that gives me a leg up on some of my creative peers in the business is that I approach everything analytically. In engineering, you're taught to problem solve analytically.