Welcome to the newest episode of Beyond the Fame with Jason Fry. I'm your host, Jason Fry, picking the brains of the top filmmakers, musicians, and artists of our time. Tonight, the Library of Congress is hosting a special outdoor screening of Shrek, which was added to its National Film Registry in the class of 2020. I spoke about the legacy of DreamWorks with co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios from 1984 to 1994 at the height of the Disney Renaissance. Katzenberg joined us last year to discuss his now-defunct streaming platform Quibi, which earned eight Emmy nominations this week despite no longer existing, making our conversation a fascinating time capsule.
Morning, Jeff. Hey, Mr. Katzenberg, thanks so much for taking the time to call in.
I'm fine. It's just you, please call me Jeffrey.
All right. Before we get started, first of all, this coronavirus thing is crazy. Are you staying safe? What are you doing for that?
Yeah, I think today may be day 26. So, you know, like everyone else, I've been sheltered in place. Just my wife and I together, and you know, kind of hunkered down. And I've been working super, super hard, so it's been a nice distraction to be honest. And it's a challenging time for everybody, and all of us each in our own way.
Absolutely. And that's what makes your new venture here, Quibi, so exciting, because it's a mobile streaming thing we can do from home. So, just start off, just give us a description. What is Quibi?
So Quibi is a super premium subscription service only for your phone, with tons of new original content made by the very best talents and creators in Hollywood. It uses a brand new technology that makes shooting content for the telephone look beautiful in a way that you've never seen before. So, full-screen, beautiful video whether you're holding your phone vertically or horizontally. We have the best talent in Hollywood making content for us, like I said. So Jennifer Lopez, Will Smith, LeBron James, Reese Witherspoon, Chrissy Teigen, Chance the Rapper doing a new version of Punk'd, Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Kevin Hart—I could go on and on, it's an endless list, fortunately. So there is something for everybody. 500 original episodes, 50 series, and all different types and sizes. So there are movies and chapters, and everything is less than 10 minutes. So this is really made for your in-between moments that you have in your day. And I think it's unlike anything anybody's seen before. And for the next 90 days, you can get it free.
Awesome. Take me into the idea behind making it. You mean this is exclusively, you know, this is meant for your phone, the palm of your hand. That's where society's going. And was the idea sort of that we're not only technologically moving towards handheld stuff, but attention-span-wise, right? Is that the idea behind short-form content?
I think it's a little of both. All I can do is say to you that for me, like I think many of your listeners, is that for the last six, eight, ten years, I've actually been quite enamored with and entertained by the stuff that I've been able to watch on my phone. So whether it's YouTube or Snapchat or Instagram TV or TikTok, I mean, these are things that are actually fun, and I've had a really good time with them and continue to. But I come out of sort of more traditional Hollywood storytelling, and so the aha moment for me is: what if we could bring our form of storytelling to this new form of watching? So could we make content for people who are on their phone, on the go, and just make it beautiful, and that it is real narrative storytelling. That's not better or worse than what you're seeing on these social media platforms, it's just different. So I love what they're doing, but I actually think this is just unique. And so here we are a year and a half later, and as I said, the most talented people in my community of making the movie and TV animation community have all turned out and made, I think, really, really fun, really entertaining content to be watched in a similar way on your phone, on the go.
You mentioned that it's under 10 minutes, TV shows and the like. You mentioned something interesting about that, they're movies broken up into chapters. How does that work?
Yeah, sure. So, you know, we're bringing back a new version of The Fugitive, and it stars Kiefer Sutherland and Boyd Holbrook. And it's that same concept of an innocent accused of a crime they didn't commit, they have to prove their innocence before the police get them. And it's a cat-and-mouse story. And this new version is set here in Los Angeles, and a new storyline for it. But it's told in 14 chapters, and each chapter is between 6 and 10 minutes long. And so there's a sort of—think of it as a beginning, a middle, and an end in each chapter, and each chapter ends on a cliffhanger that makes you want to come back the next day for the next chapter. And over the course of those 14 chapters, it's a two-hour movie.
