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…ld put them in these Fox movies was if I would buy them. So, oh, great. There I sat with Darryl Zanuck and his smoking cigar, with me watching a scene from the most awful movie you could ever imagine. So, yeah, I got those guys. Wow. As I was reading your book and thinking about your career, you're one of these rare people that started in media and was successful in media and then jumped and became even more successful in technology. I mean, that's a very rare chasm. It's an odd passage. Yeah. And when we say you started in media, you started in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency, which is not a thing in tech at all. Tech doesn't have mailrooms. There ain't no mailrooms left anywhere at this time. Well, probably not. But the great thing it had was a file room. There weren't actually digital files; it was a big room with physical files—yeah, physical, big, you know, I don't know, file cabinets, like 50 of them. And I basically read from A to Z. I read the entire file room, starting when I was 19 until I was 22. So, because William Morris was the oldest and biggest talent agency, having been in business 70 years, I had the entire history of the entertainment business that I got to read. How could you do better than that? This is like you had the email archives of all the executives, right? Hollywood, but not email. It wasn't emails. There were no emails. There was no such thing as emails. There was no 'e.' There was mail. And so it jumped out at me as I was reading the book, because it felt like the thing that David and I have stumbled on with Acquired is: immerse yourself in a massive amount of primary research. The human brain is good at finding patterns in that. And it seems like you learned the entertainment business the same way. You just let all these messages and files wash over you until it kind of clicked: "I understand the way this industry works." Is that right? Well, yeah, I got to read literally the history of Elvis Presley from the moment he recorded his first song through his entire career, and every other person in the entire spectrum of entertainment. So you can't get a better foundation. It depends, of course, what you use it for. There's no school you could go to that would ever teach you that. Yeah. So your next chapter after William Morris Agency is ABC. Yes. And you're working. This era, the '60s and '70s, ABC was this crazy talent magnet for a lot of people. Think of Rune Arledge, Bob Iger. What made ABC this? ABC was the number three... There were three networks. They had 100% of the viewing, about 100 million people, never divided equally by three. ABC was the youngest, actually, at that time, probably by 20 years or so, and it was the least established. So it was run like a candy store. If you wanted responsibility, you could just take it, and you could do new things or things that were deemed very risky, because you had to take chances to get yourself landed. So it was also, again, serendipitously, the greatest luck you could have: to be a 23-year-old vice president. At 23, I was a vice president. No, that's really unfair. That even makes it worse. I was at 25 and a half. Okay, okay, okay. usly, the greatest luck you could have: to be a 23-year-old vice president. At 23, I was a vice president. No, that's really unfair. That even makes it worse. I was at 25 and a half. Okay, okay, okay. That was still the youngest. It was the youngest ever. Yeah, but you're in charge of movies at ABC at 25 and a half, right? Yeah. Well, we started a thing called Movie of the Week, which no one had ever made original movies for television. We thought that was a good idea, and everybody thought it would fail, thank God, or otherwise they would have never let me do it. It was truly, inside of a network, a total startup of actually building a movie. After two years, we were making 75 of them a year. So we started with one employee, me, and I got to, because I then hired all these people to do all these tasks. I had to learn those tasks as I was doing it, so I got to understanding. I think the best way to learn to be a manager is to actually do the groundwork, and I got to do that. All the stuff I think I learned about, if I ever learned anything—people who work with me might not totally agree—but learning how to manage people is because you understand the tasks that need to be done. I got that ability. We started making 25, and then it was so successful we added a second and then a third night. So we were up to making 75 of them a year. They cost—I mean, it's inconceivable today when a single episode of a one-hour show can cost $10 million. We made these movies for about $500,000 each. Wow. As you learned the movie side of things, how did Paramount end up coming into the picture for you? I'm a middle-level vice president of ABC, successful because the stuff I—the movies and then the miniseries, which we started to do too—were all fine. I got promoted above my level of competence because they made me take over all series programming. I didn't like series. They were all static—half-hour comedies and hour-long drama shows. Nothing ever happened to the characters because they had to stay in the same age and life that they were in, in the storytelling. So, the rug would have gotten pulled out from under me, even though I had been successful over there because of the successful stuff. Then, over the horizon came my rescue in the person of Charles Bluhdorn, who owned a huge industrial conglomerate called Gulf and Western. They owned Paramount, and I had gotten to know him because I sold movies to Paramount. And that's a whole crazy story. They started Gulf and Western making bumpers for cars and ended up in a hundred different businesses, including owning... Including Paramount. Yeah. He sought the Puerto Rican sugar. I mean, I don't think there was... maybe they didn't do grave digging, but practically everything else. Well, they did make The Godfather, so... You know, but they didn't really do that. But they had so many businesses. And this was a time in the '50s, '60s where conglomerates like IT&T and Gulf and Western were actually, I think, the largest. And Charlie, who at that time was in his 40s, maybe late 30s, early. 40s. So he was young too. Yeah. And he had done this, I mean, in like 10 years. He built this thing up. ally, I think, the largest. And Charlie, who at that time was in his 40s, maybe late 30s, early. 40s. So he was young too. Yeah. And he had done this, I mean, in like 10 years. He built this thing up. Anyway, he had wanted me to come to work for Paramount, and I had never wanted to work there because I didn't like the management of Paramount. And so I kept saying no to him. And one day he ordered me up to his office. And he said, "Okay, I'm going to make you chairman of Paramount." I said, "Charlie, this is insane! I'm a vice president of ABC in television. Paramount is a movie company. You can't do that!" He said, "Oh, yes, I can!" And that would make you the legendary Bob Evans' boss. Yeah. And I said—he said, "No, no, you're doing it." And actually, I thought I went to Leonard Goldenson, who was the chairman and founder of ABC, who had once actually worked as a kind of line person at Paramount, and told him this and said, "You know, I'm thinking, Leonard, of not doing it." He said, "If you're that stupid, I'll fire you!" But you weren't, really. I mean, you had the opportunity to run a movie studio, one of the five major movie studios, in your 30s. This never happened before. Yeah, that's true. And for the first two years I kind of failed because I had to figure out how to do it the way I wanted to do it. And it was very trying. And that rug really came close to pulling me out of it. And then we released a movie called *Saturday Night Fever*. And right after that, *Grease*. And that was John Travolta's first movie, right? Pardon me, *Saturday Night Fever* was John Travolta's first movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. John Travolta came from television, from a television series called *Welcome Back, Kotter*. And we put him in this movie. And people said we were crazy. How could we put a television... Television people—the movie people were such snobs. They kind of peed on the people in television, and they thought, "How can you put this television comedy guy into this movie?" This big movie... it wasn't that big a movie, actually, in terms of whatever. But it was a real theatrical movie. And the first night we previewed it—not previewed it, we did it—we did a kind of semi-little premiere at the old Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, this famous old theater. And at about... And he invited basically Hollywood to come because we were really proud of this movie. It was kind of my last gasp. And I was proud of it, although I certainly needed to work.…

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