You're very kind. But again, I was just part of it. But the thing which was for me interesting was...
No, you weren't just part of it because we would have these meetings where you would lecture us on what was coming, and whether it was the internet, which you were talking about before Al Gore did, or whether it was 3D technology, or whether it was soundless fireworks, digital cinema, enormous audio enhancements that are now being used around the world and particularly at our parks.
No, it's not that we did it all. It's that we had to think about it.
Thank you for coming. Thank you for being here.
Well, it's welcome to a new member of the East Hampton community.
It's particularly good if there's any kind of nuclear attack.
Exactly. It's good to be ready. A studio from which to report devastation from the secret headquarters.
So, we've known each other for how long now?
25 years easily. And you know, a long time ago, when I was sort of on my own and running a little company here, we got introduced, I think by Jim Henson originally.
Wow. I think that's right. It went back that far. And you know, I worked for you for 10 years or thereabouts. And I got to tell you that the Disney experience was a great experience because of the ability to be part of what you and Frank were building, transforming a company that, to be unkind, was on the edge of being sold off as a real estate transaction into the powerhouse it was. Tell me about that. How did you get there? When the opportunity was presented, clearly they didn't have in mind what you would do with it, right? So, did it just happen or did you have a preconceived idea of what you wanted to do or how did that work?
A little of all of it. Most of it just happened. I was a president of Paramount before I came to Disney. And I know Paramount looked at Disney, Gulf and Western was the parent company of Paramount, and dismissed it immediately because Disney had become a class A children's company and can't take it seriously. Not being run very well. And Universal looked at it. Lou Wasserman looked at it. Nobody was interested. And I had been at Paramount for eight years and I knew some of the Disney people from CalArts, University of California and California Institute of the Arts. And I got a call one day. I was with my kids at camp in Vermont. 'Do you have a contract at Paramount?' I said, 'Well, I did but it's coming to an end.' 'Would you be interested in Disney?' I thought, 'Yeah, I'm a Disney kind of person.'
And the next week I was in the middle of the chaos of a company being taken over and falling apart. And Frank Wells, who had been the president of Warner Bros., had taken some time off to climb Mount Everest and other mountains. And we ended up being kind of brought in by the new financial people. I was the CEO. Frank was the COO. And we're walking down the street the first day. I had no idea what I was getting into. I had been to Disneyland. Obviously, we'd made movies. We made television, but Disney was kind of out of that. It's kind of a theme park company. And I turned to Frank and said, 'I think we made the right decision.' And you could feel the culture. You could feel the exuberance and how much they accepted us as new people. And we were not exactly Disney kind of people. We were like Hollywood people. I was Paramount. He was Warner Bros. And from then it was really cheerleading and sometimes the obvious is the right way to go and there was a lot of obvious.
Well, ridiculously low-hanging fruit. We were able to attract both people from Paramount and Warner Bros. in the film entertainment area. The first day I went over to the Imagineers where all the creative development was done for the parks. I got lost and I was with the ex-CEO. We couldn't even find WDI. That's how much the parks were exactly considered mainstream. Right. We finally found it and all of a sudden it was like going to FAO Schwarz. It was the excitement of all the things going on and what could happen and everything was being ignored there. They would come up with something great and nobody would even listen to them because they didn't have the money. And so one thing led to another and I think the first thing that happened which was kind of fortuitous is that the parks were undervalued. They were so cheap they were like less than going to a movie. And it's a little bit commercial to say this but we raised the price of the parks, still well below their value.
Turned out to be a really good idea.
Waterfall of money. And that created the ability to invest in the parks, to invest in the movies, to invest in international.
And isn't it interesting that that apparently never occurred to anyone? The idea that they were underpriced in the market.
You know, Walt died. It was 18 years later. The people that took over were really good people, but they were basically the marketing kind of people. They weren't attached to Hollywood. They weren't in the Motion Picture Association and they weren't attached to Wall Street. And it was like you're a brilliant family, but you live in the woods.
And even the most brilliant family or the most brilliant person has to have some connection with the outside world. And they didn't really have it. They were flailing in the movie business. They didn't know how to deal with home video. They didn't know whether to put the library out. Obviously digital hadn't happened yet. And it was all low-hanging fruit. And neither Frank nor I are geniuses. Frank was actually more of a genius than I was. It was so obvious. And it was cheerleading a group of great people. And here's the interesting thing. I've been to a lot of companies and when companies are taken over, everybody assumes everybody that's in the company that has been taken over are idiots and they make these statements about how they're going to make everything great and then they don't. They fire everybody.
And then they have no one working for them.
Well, my view is that they were all idiots. Maybe there were 20,000 people in the company. Now there are 150,000. But I was sure they were great people. They just weren't allowed to be. And all of a sudden I found a lot of people that were excellent and they just had never been listened to. And that included the development of new ideas and technology and engineering for the parks. And we had no IP at that time. We hadn't made a movie in 18 years that anybody wanted to see. So we went out and the first thing we did is we got Star Wars and Indiana Jones on which to do something in the park.
To give, and then Michael Jackson. And we had those three things and then we started making movies like Little Mermaid and so forth and it all flowed from there.
Yeah. Well, it's interesting and it's funny because when you were saying that your notion of knowing about Disney and all but weren't really a Disney guy, I felt exactly the same way. I mean, I had been to a Disney theme park and said, 'Gee, this is kind of nicely done.' And so on, but never really thought of myself as being a Disney fan. It was just impressive what had been built and how it worked. And it was kind of interesting because the idea I'd never worked for anyone before. And so that was kind of an interesting thing to do that. Well, Frank came to me and said, and I went to him and said, 'We have to have the best person in each area.' Frank was really a great lawyer. So, we had that covered and I had done a lot of creative work in movies and television, but we didn't have finance, so we went out and got what we thought was the best finance person in the country. We didn't have technology and physical theatricality. And I don't know how your name first popped up, but I think Frank came to me and said, 'There's a guy who did Broadway, did lighting, did engineering, he's in East Hampton, he's unique. He's invented this, he's invented that.' And it seemed to us that we could shake it up by having somebody from the outside, namely Bran Ferren, to come in and energize, even though they were ready to be energized, this entire group. And boy, were we right. And were you right because very soon after you came, you were talking about fireworks that didn't make an explosion on the ground. And we were having a lot of trouble with the local homeowners around Disneyland. And you were talking about elevators that could drop faster than 32 feet per second squared. And all these things that I kind of heard in college and high school and never listened to and didn't really understand all of a sudden were applicable to what we were doing. And you presented ideas that were so stupid and so right. And some were feasible and we did like the General Motors attraction and some we never got around to and they're still getting around to them now. I didn't think the clock that you were developing with Danny Hillis that would be perpetual for 25,000 years would really affect my life. But some of the other things seem to be exactly worthwhile. And it just changed the parks and now they're worldwide. We were developing Euro Disney. It was Disneyland Paris. We did this and we only did it in a few areas. We did it in finance. We did it in finance/Wall Street because we didn't even know the address of where Goldman Sachs was. We did it in movies and television by bringing people in from the other studios. And we did it with you in the parks. The management of the parks was no problem because Walt hired all these military people and everything ran like West Point. So there was no problem in running the parks except for those people who were great would want a walkway instead of being eight feet wide being 28 feet wide because you could...
Exactly. Everybody, nobody would trip. And that direction would lead you to mediocrity, which is what happened actually in Walt Disney World. Disneyland, Walt did, and Walt wore two hats. He was both left brain and right brain. One hat was the practical, that was the military group, and the other hat was the creative. After he died, the creative disappeared. And when his brother built Walt Disney World, it was Cement City. It wasn't landscaped. The benches looked like something that came out of some, you know, today would be Amazon. But indestructible. Indestructible. Absolutely. Walkways were way too large and creativity was stifled. And that's what we brought, I don't know if it was the left brain or right brain, whatever part of the brain is creativity and innovation, we brought to the parks which you were leading. And that changed not only the culture of the parks but the culture of the company. Every company has to be led creatively but at the same time it has to work.
Yeah. Well, and it's interesting, you know, in the, you know, Jack Welch execution, it's great to have the idea but if you can't execute it doesn't matter. If you can't operate it doesn't matter. You got to get it all right. And for me it was so much fun because as you said Disney had great talent and the key was to just pluck out the ideas because, you know, I always found people think, well, there aren't enough great ideas in the world. The world is filled with great ideas. How do you pick the right one? Which one should you go ahead with? And that's why I always enjoyed working with you is ideas would be developed at Imagineering. Our job is get it in front of you. Let's look, is there a business case? How do you make the thing work? But then, you know, actually building is the fun part. It's, you know, getting it to work. And I must say it was really fascinating for the whole time I was at Disney. When people say, 'Well, what do you do?' 'I work at Disney.' 'Oh, Disney.' They immediately go into a story about their family or their life. And it was a great privilege to be at a company that creates lifelong positive memories for families. And it is so funny because having grown up as a New York City kid, there was a lot of generalized cynicism about Disney and all of this. And you hear it's not real. Of course it's not real. You want real, stay home. You know this.
Well, interesting. That was the worst market for Disney in the world. When I went to Disney, when you would say Disney in New York, it was almost a pejorative. And my goal, and I'm from New York City, and my goal was to make Disney relevant in New York City. So, if we could make Disney relevant in New York City, it would be relevant all over the world.
Exactly. And we did that through a lot of things including a whole new level of food at Walt Disney World. A whole new level of attractions, a whole new level of movies that were now not just only G-rated movies, but some movies that would appeal to adults. The first movie being Down and Out in Beverly Hills which was...
Which was immediately, that was our first movie. Our first television show was Golden Girls. All of a sudden, people said, 'Hey, they're not brain dead.' And when we finally ended up with Beauty and the Beast on Broadway and then Elton John's Aida, but when we ended up with Lion King and changed the Broadway theater through creativity and Julie Taymor directing, all of a sudden New York was our number one market. So, we went from...
Yeah. To the... which is, and we try, we're still, I think they're still trying to do it in Paris. It's even more cynical in Paris than New York, but it did happen.
Well, yeah. And it was fascinating to watch that transformation. 42nd Street, you know, I mean, 42nd Street now is such a different place than it was when we were kids growing up. I mean, you took your life in your hands walking down 42nd Street. Well, when I grew up, 42nd Street was the... Well, there were two things in New York that you did as a teenager. You went to Tribeca to watch the transvestites with your friends. Walk around. Now, Tribeca is the hottest place.
And you went to 42nd Street for the Fascination, that game place called Fascination. What you would go to, or triple features on 42nd Street. Mostly action-oriented things, but some as you got older, you saw they were a little more salacious. And to me, I forgot about 42nd Street. You mentioned 42nd Street. I had people trying to get me involved in 42nd Street for a long time. I had a dinner in California where Marian Haskell, who was the Salsberger, talked to me about it at dinner. It was all set up and I ignored it. I had Bob Stern, the architect, talking about it. I ignored it. I just, oh my god. And then one day I was driving, got on the Lincoln Tunnel, was driving down 42nd Street, and I said to my wife, 'You know what? Let's go into the New Amsterdam Theater. Let's just look in it.' And we kind of broke in, which wasn't that hard.
And there were birds flying around and there was mold on the floor, a little bit like what you were talking to me about before about some house that had not been attended to for years. And there was bird feces everywhere. But you could see because it wasn't a rainy day. You could see the molding and the seats that were all falling apart. And I called Frank and I said, 'Frank, I think two things. This is the right brain and the left brain again. I think this is going to be fantastic. We're thinking about doing Lion King in New York. What do you think? I think we should do this.' And so the next time he came and we stopped at 42nd Street, we stopped at that side of New Amsterdam. He was propositioned twice by prostitutes. There was an adult bookstore with peep shows in it. And he said, 'Well, you think they don't move?' So we agreed to do it. And I was talking to the mayor of New York, Giuliani, because we thought the either the right brain or the left brain now started to work about business. And I thought, well, if we revolutionize 42nd Street, they'll give us the theater, they'll give us money. You know, I thought it'd be a good deal.
Yeah. My deal moment exactly came in, which resulted in it being a deal.
But I did say that before we signed the paper, I met with Giuliani and I said, you know, how are you going to get rid of the prostitutes? How are you going to get rid of the adult movie theaters? And he said, 'Well, they'll be gone.' And I said, 'I don't know. The ACLU, you can't just tell a porno shop he's got to move.' He said, 'They'll be gone.' I said, 'Mr. Mayor, in all due respect...' He stopped me and he said, 'Look me in the eyes.' He said, 'Look me in the eye.' I said, 'Really?' I said, 'Okay, they will be gone.' In the scariest voice I ever heard.
And I called Frank up and said, 'Let's do it.'
Yeah. And so, and then, and I, you know, we didn't think that it was going to revolutionize 42nd Street. I just wanted a theater. I was tired of paying the Schuberts.
All this money and I really believed the Lion King would be forever and I wanted a theater for it and we could get a good deal and this great theater would be renovated although the seats are too small and your knees are in your chest and we had to because of the historical society we had to keep them that way but 182 seats was worth it.
Yeah. Well, and the rest is history, as they say. It's...
It's, and you know, all those theaters now on 42nd Street, the Victory Theater, which is a children's theater across the street. It's all great.
It's remarkable how that entire neighborhood is transformed.
But it really was transformed.
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's not by the Lion King.
Yeah. Anybody that thinks you can do something just by engineering it and making it clean and making it this, you need that last piece which is the ultimate, which is the Hamilton of today. It's Lion King. It's something that no matter how many porn shops and prostitutes are there, they got to get in to see Lion King. Eventually, Lion King is going to, the Lions, Mufasa is going to get rid of the porn shop.
I like this. So, something we share is that any success that we've enjoyed has been based upon the ability to attract and retain top talent, right? I mean, that's it. It doesn't matter what you do if you don't have a good story, if you don't have good people to tell the story and all. How do you view talent? How have you looked at that as an enabler in your life and career?
Well, I have a twisted view of top talent. I've been accused of waiting outside the Betty Ford clinic in Palm Springs for Bette Midler and Nick Nolte to get out and then I can get them less expensively and they can go do Down and Out in Beverly Hills. And that's always been a joke that I'm a big advocate of finding talent that is real, but for some reason you can get them at a time in their life when they really are hungry. That's either at the very beginning or at some point later. I'm a big believer in developing talent. I'm in the process, if it goes through, of buying an English soccer team. And the one I'm looking at is the one that has the best academy of developing. They start at 8, being billeted in families in this town. And this is the premier team on building young talent. And the team is the opposite of, for instance, a team like Manchester United which buys at an enormous price talent from Spain and Argentina and so forth. I'm a believer in developing your own new talent and this has served me well in the movie area, in the television area. We had a policy both at Paramount and later at Disney that we would make as many films as everybody else, but we would make them with strong ideas with emerging talent to an extent. Of course, we would also do occasionally with well-known talent on projects that we own that they were desperate to do. Warner Bros. had the opposite point of view. They would fly Barbara Streisand's dog to Hawaii if she missed her dog. And the fact of the matter is between us and Warner Bros., we were both number one and number two. Both strategies worked. Warner Bros., but we were number one financially. Warner Bros. worked very well. They would get the biggest and best talent to make movies. We would get the newest and most interesting talent and both were successful at different levels. So to me, it's a combination of picking the right talent at the right time. For instance, you were ready to try working for a company. You would never work for another company. You had worked on your own. You had always had to worry about paying your own staff. Everything you did, you had to pay for yourself. You had to go out and earn it. And I could tell you at a moment in your career that you were ready to say, you know what, maybe I'll try this other thing where I don't have to worry about, you know, if somebody travels first class or they travel coach, I don't have to worry about seeing somebody's expenses constantly that they're taking advantage of me. I don't have to go get somebody who will do, because I can't afford it. I'm now going to go to a company. And I said to Frank at the time, I can remember distinctly, this is the right time for this guy. 10 years ago, no, because 10 years ago he wanted to do it on his own. And obviously 10 years later, you are doing your own, but you've now built Go Figure.
You built your professionalism. You came to Disney. You succeeded at Disney. You knew everybody in the world in government. And then when you go on your own, you have a better platform than you would have had before. And I knew maybe instinctually, I can't say that I wrote it down on a piece of paper, that this was the right time for Bran Ferren and Disney. Your talent is no different today or before Disney. But we probably couldn't have attracted you earlier, 10 years earlier. And now, you know, why would you go to Disney or any company like that? It's not worth it. You, they'll be a client. You and I could work for them.
And I appreciate your instincts because it was a lot of fun and it was interesting because there's this process of when you've had your own company all your life, selling your company is kind of a strange feeling and you go through a lot of, well, is this, you know, the right thing? It wasn't agonizing, it was just sort of, well, interesting. And you know, the left and the right brain, one side of you says, well, this is an interesting set of challenges, it's a new platform. I think your words were, 'I can give you a bigger sandbox.' And that was interesting. And the other side of you is saying, yeah, but then you say, well, how bad could it be, you know, right? And if it doesn't work you can leave. So for me, first of all, it was a great experience and it was also at kind of an interesting moment in the world because a whole bunch of things in technology were just starting to happen which meant if you paid attention you could appear smarter than you were.
Right. So with just the 3D revolution, you were way before anybody else driving me crazy about 3D and you wanted to spend, which we did, all this money in developing the camera. And I kept thinking, well, you know, it makes you nauseous. Does 3D really going to work? And your work in 3D led Disney to lead in the content of 3D. Whether we actually became the definitive 3D camera or not was less important than being conscious that this was a different technology than the 50s. And that was driven completely by you.
Well, you're very kind. But again, I was just part of it. But the thing which was for me interesting was...
No, you weren't just part of it because we would have these meetings where you would lecture us on what was coming and whether it was the internet, which you were talking about before Al Gore did, or whether it was 3D technology, or whether it was soundless fireworks, digital cinema, enormous audio enhancements that are now being used around the world and particularly at our parks.
No, it's not that we did it all. It's that we had to think about it. Executives don't read technical magazines. They generally don't. So the only way they learn about it is after the fact and that's too late or somebody driving them crazy who does read technical magazines.
Right. Exactly. So that was very helpful.
Well, it was also fun because I got to work in the creative world and the technical world and the operational world of how we make it work. And that's a lot of fun, is translating between those groups. Because of course, I remember I was once in a conversation with a studio executive and Andy Grove and they were both talking about architecture and went on for half an hour about the various things and they were talking about two completely different subjects. Andy was talking about machine and technical architecture and this other person was talking about the architecture of buildings and architects and they were having a grand old time but actually having two separate conversations. And I've always found that that's kind of fun, is being able to translate between the two. It was also exciting at Disney because you gave me the leeway to play with these things. And so we were, you know, we built what now became the PlayStation before it ever existed. We did direct music delivery to the home before iTunes. And as you say, some of them missed, some of them worked. We had the El Capitan Theater doing digital cinema 10 years before anyone ever mentioned the word digital cinema.
But didn't it frustrate you? I always felt that you were frustrated that you were dealing with troglodytes, me and others that thought two things. One, this is not real. Secondly, if it is, it's not going to happen in my lifetime. And third, if we're going to develop it, it's going to break us in the bank.
Yeah. And so you're always up against non-believers or believers, but people that don't want to, you know, the pure research is so expensive and you don't know where it's leading that only the drug companies then seem to charge an enormous amount of money later can afford it.
Well, I mean, is it frustrating with a small F? Meaning you didn't want to go home at night and say, 'I'm going to kill these guys. These guys are driving me nuts.'
It's part of the game. And but for me, I've always looked at it that it's my failing if I'm not able to convince someone why this is a great idea. Meaning, I'm not telling a compelling enough story or making the case for it. So...
Well, no, you would do an open house and there would be 40 ideas there. And it was like, oh my god, which one are we going to do? I remember once you were developing a light that could be in Pirates of the Caribbean or one of our rides at Disneyland that looked like a candle and acted like a candle but wasn't a candle. And that was really an easy thing to fund and it worked and it went into the parks and it dealt with the fire code that we didn't have to have fires anymore. And those lights which are now available from, I don't know, General Electric, whoever, developed by you, are in a chandelier I have.
And they look like candles.
See that? They look like candles. So here was something in an open house that you showed us ends up in my chandelier 10 years later for I don't know $4 a light or something ridiculous.
So this pure research does end up someplace. Well, it was interesting because I remember when this whole, you know, this little thing called the internet was coming around where, you know, back around '98, the idea that this was relevant to the entertainment industry, no studio executive believed because what was it? And I remember I bought the first computers for every Disney executive and had them delivered to their office followed by, 'Fran, what's this thing that just arrived?' Because then an MIS terminal, you know, a management information system terminal, which only the CFO had, was the extent of it. And it's really interesting because when you find yourself thinking about some of these ideas before a lot of people have thought of them in the industry that you're in and it kind of clicks as to why this is a big deal. You build in your mind, right or wrong, a rationale that says here's why this is going to happen. Just like you get the idea about the theater, you know, and the property all of a sudden it clicks and you realize got to do this. And that's what happens with these technology things. But what is often frustrating is how long it does take for them to happen. I mean, broadband was so obvious back when we were working, but it's hard to imagine how the whole telecom and phone company business could not take this seriously in a way that they're now paying a pretty major price for in many cases. I think it was interesting that and one of the reasons I think you came to Disney is the idea of brand and brand...
Came together. And somebody has to create the initial thing that makes the brand. So Walt created that, Disney was there and Walt created it. And Google created it with search and Microsoft created it with Windows and so forth. But then once you have the brand, if you can get a Bran Ferren to join the brand, you then do all sorts of things to make it grow in ancillary products. I've acquired a company called Topps which is the American baseball card company and it started as a baseball card company and bubblegum. And there's such an emotional response here in the US and mostly with men who the first thing they say to me, 'My mother threw out my cards, they were under my bed, I got to finance my whole college education.'
Exactly. But there is an emotional tie to fun and sports like there is an emotional tie to Disney and family as there is an emotional tie to Coke and thirst, not Coke and entertainment. They made that mistake. So I've now taken that brand, the Topps brand, and try to do a much smaller scale because it's a much smaller brand and not worldwide. Well, it is now worldwide. And unfortunately I don't have a Bran Ferren but try to think of what can I do with that brand to make it relevant to people that are somewhat younger than me. And we're doing it in digital and we're now, people, kids can collect cards on their phone, they can trade on their phone. There could be three backs of each card not just one back. So one back is a video clip, one back is the history, one back is, you know, whatever. And the whole, it's still not as big as the cardboard which is going to go away someday, but this thing called the internet and the iPhone and the Android, I need a Bran Ferren. So it's not only knowing that what you need but it's not making a mistake in hiring the person who was what you thought you need who didn't achieve it. And I have done that often. It's not that you hired... Here's the problem. Somebody who is terrible is obvious and somebody who is fantastic is obvious. And everybody else is in between. And that's a disaster. You get rid of the terrible. You promote and make love to the great and you accept the mediocre. There is all companies. And the mediocre kills you. And you don't deal with the mediocre because it's tomorrow's business and somebody else will deal with it. So recognizing your need and then finding a match for your need is not so easy.
Especially because it's a moving target and you know as your company grows you have different needs. And what made you think about acquiring Topps? Because that doesn't strike me as something that you wake up one morning and say, or is it? How did that happen?
I had no interest in Topps. I didn't know anything about it. I can remember kind of, I don't want a collector. So I think I probably bought three things in my life. I hate that the bubblegum was like stiff and it broke your teeth and all that stuff. Guy, I, when I left Disney, I took a person with me who was 23, was going to Harvard Business School...
Convinced him that maybe working with me was as good as being Harvard.
