Sarnoff has been the only woman in the room more times than she can count. Her approach was never to call it out loudly or make it the centerpiece of every interaction. Instead, she chose a quieter, more strategic form of persistence.

“Why would I do that? I want them to see me as an equal, and I’m gonna more accentuate the things we have in common than the things we have different.”

She is quick to credit the women who made her own ascent possible – Sherry Lansing, Kay Graham, Shelly Lazarus, and Geri Laybourne at Nickelodeon, whose mentorship Sarnoff describes as foundational. And she is equally direct about what still needs to change, referencing the DEI work done at MTV Networks under Tom Freston at a time when neither the law nor the culture demanded it.

“We did it because it was the right thing to do, but also because we weren’t representing the audiences. We’re sitting around the executive table, and we didn’t look like the audience. And in the media business, people tend to program to themselves. If you’re not diverse in who’s making those decisions, you will fail.”

Sarnoff’s time at Nickelodeon is where her philosophy of audience-first programming was forged. As head of strategy and later research, she oversaw a department running roughly 200 focus groups a year. The purpose of these focus groups was not to ask kids whether they liked a show, but to understand what made them tick, what scared them, what they wanted from their friendships, their parents, and their world.

“Cable started with the customer. That is the key. It went to what people love. You love music, we’re gonna give you MTV. You like comedy? Comedy Central. The advertisers got a much more efficient route to market. And Nickelodeon got so big because we were true to the audience. That was the special sauce.”

That strategy produced some of the most enduring children’s programming ever made. When a toy executive told Sarnoff that the Rugrats babies were ugly, she pushed back immediately. “That’s because you’re looking at it through your adult lens. If you’re a kid, you look at Tommy Pickles as a hero.”

The Blue’s Clues story is another example of what happens when you truly let go of adult assumptions. After an early focus group where two-to-five-year-olds ran up and touched the screen, thinking the host was speaking directly to them, the team knew they had something extraordinary. Out of necessity, they began airing the same episode five days in a row — something unheard of on television — and discovered that ratings rose every day through Thursday.

“If you’re thinking like an adult, none of these things would have happened. Knowing your audience — that’s where the genius came from.”

By the time John Stankey called in the spring of 2019, Sarnoff had spent decades building toward a moment she couldn’t have planned. Her daughter had just matched to her first-choice residency at UCLA. The timing felt like more than a coincidence. She arrived at Warner Bros. in August 2019 and walked into Jack Warner’s office, her new workspace. On the wall was a photograph of every person who had ever held her job. All of them were men. Dating back to 1923.

“Probably one of the most proud, iconic remembrances of my time there is my picture on that wall with all the men from 1923 on.”

There was also something waiting in the office that she hadn’t expected. The Warner Archive had found, among the papers of her father-in-law, William Sarnoff, who had purchased DC Comics decades earlier, the original letter approving Christopher Reeve as Superman for the Richard Donner film. It was framed and hanging on the wall. Her first months were defined by building trust. She clarified accountabilities, instituted regular meetings with her direct reports, and drew a clear line around confidentiality after a sensitive conversation appeared in the Hollywood Reporter.

“We all got paid good money. We all need to focus our energy on making the company successful. The company comes first.”

Joker launched weeks after she arrived, won the Golden Lion at Venice, and became one of the biggest films in Warner Bros. history. Nobody had predicted the scale of it. Then COVID arrived, the streaming wars accelerated, and Sarnoff found herself steering an iconic institution through a period of transformation that the industry is still processing.

Sarnoff traces the current period of consolidation and correction directly back to the dynamics that took hold during the streaming era. Every platform needed content. COVID sent audiences home and further amplified demand. Production scaled to meet a moment that, in retrospect, was unsustainable.

“All of that led to an accumulation of content that what we’ve been suffering with since COVID started abating was just this escalation of production that wasn’t necessarily trued up to where the demand was. It was circumstantially supply-side things that propelled the increases.”

She sees 2024 as the reckoning and the current moment as one of genuine stabilization. And she is cautiously optimistic about what a reset makes possible.

“I think kind of the creative and the commercial are coming together more cohesively now. There’s been a lot of disjointedness in those two areas. I just hope that as we reset and start to grow again, that the creativity is as broad as possible.”

Her worry is not that the industry will fail to recover. It is that a recovery built only on superheroes, action, and horror will leave too much on the table. The audiences are there for original stories. The demand is there, and someone just has to be willing to green-light them.

Drawing on her board role at Regal Cineworld, Sarnoff makes a case for theatrical exhibition that goes well beyond the movies themselves. She points to overcapacity that has existed since at least 2001, ticket revenue that masked flat attendance for years, and a real estate footprint that is currently largely unused from Sunday through Thursday.

The solution, in her view, is not to double down on the same model. It is to reimagine what a theater is for.

“Why wouldn’t you go to a movie theater and have it treat the experience more like a party? I think there should be a quiet car and a noisy car version, because if you’re in Wicked and you want to sing at the top of your lungs, you should be able to do that.”

She envisions theaters expanding into live sports, gaming, comedy, the creator economy, first and last episodes of major franchise series, and events where audiences can dress up and celebrate the things they love. She points to the finale of Stranger Things as proof.

“People want to gather in third spaces. You have your home, your work, and then you want somewhere else. Theaters are a perfect third space. The only limit is our imagination of what we can do in those buildings.”

Her message to exhibitors is the same one she has carried through every role she has ever held. Start with the customer. Find out what they want. Then build it.

“Knowing your audience — that’s where the genius came from.”

The full conversation between Ann Sarnoff and Kevin Goetz is available now.

Ford rose quickly through the ranks, co-heading acquisitions, running overseas production offices, and ultimately leading international sales across 70 territories. He describes those years in two buckets.

The first was education. He was flying to Paris to try to acquire Amélie before anyone else saw it. He was sitting up all night at film festivals bidding on prestige dramas. He oversaw marketing and publicity campaigns globally alongside filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Anthony Minghella, Kevin Smith, and James Mangold.

“That was an incredible immersion program for me in how to work with world-class filmmakers in sales, in marketing, in publicity, in deal-making. That’s where I learned my movie business skills.”

The second bucket was entrepreneurial awakening. Watching Harvey and Bob Weinstein operate, Ford began to sense that he wanted to build something of his own.

“Those guys were hustlers, and they were entrepreneurs. Over the course of those six or seven years, I sort of felt — nah, I want to do this on my own.”

Ford’s departure from Miramax was catalyzed by an unlikely detour: a high-profile bid to buy his hometown soccer club, Liverpool FC. The attempt fell short, but it lit something in him. He and his wife made a decision. Stay in the US, stay in film, but do it independently.

He borrowed $5 million from a London hedge fund, moved to Los Angeles, and launched IM Global in 2007. Early financing partners came and went, including a German public company that collapsed within six months. Ford kept going.

“I basically picked up the baton and started running like hell.”

Two films broke the company out. The first was Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man, which performed strongly internationally. The second changed everything.

When Paranormal Activity was languishing in limbo at DreamWorks, Ford watched it alone in a conference room under bright strip lighting and sensed something was there. He paid $250,000 for the international rights.

What followed became one of the more creative gambits in recent independent film history. With the film still stuck at Paramount after the DreamWorks acquisition, Ford and producer Jason Blum organized a midnight screening at AFM in Santa Monica. Loud rock music in the auditorium. No one let in until five minutes before showtime. A line two blocks long snaking down the street.

“Of course, the film in a packed movie theater played through the roof.”

Kevin Goetz, who was brought in to test the film, revealed on the podcast that Steven Spielberg suggested the final reshoot that raised test scores by 15 to 20 points and sealed Paramount’s decision to release the film theatrically. The international rights deal Ford had made for $250,000 payed tremendous dividends. Two years later, he sold IM Global to Reliance, the Indian conglomerate that had also invested in DreamWorks.

With Reliance backing, Ford shifted the company’s model from selling other people’s films to financing and owning its own. The first film IM Global ever financed was a Jason Statham action film called Safe. More followed, building toward the two films Ford considers his proudest creative achievements from that era: Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, for which he committed a $28 million international minimum guarantee, and Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating passion project Silence.

“It becomes a much more interesting business when you’re not on the hamster wheel of make a movie, sell a movie, make a movie, sell a movie. It’s make a movie, own a movie forever.”

After selling IM Global to a Chinese private equity group in 2016, Ford departed within a year and launched AGC Studios in 2018 with fresh capital and no non-compete restrictions. The company has since produced nearly 45 films and television shows, including Hitman, Woman of the Hour, The Tinder Swindler, and the $150 million epic Those About to Die.

Ask Ford why he is still standing when so many of his peers have not survived the industry’s upheavals, and his answer is clear.

“I think it’s marrying creative risk-taking with prudent financial investment, and then being good at execution.”

He is equally candid about what happens when that discipline slips. Chris Pine’s directorial debut, Poolman, is his cautionary tale, a screwball-noir homage to 70s cinema that Ford partly backed out of personal affection for Pine as a filmmaker.

“I allowed myself to maybe just drink the Kool-Aid by 10%, 20%. That’s the difference between making money and losing money.”

His preferred case study in getting it right is Ron Howard’s Eden. The film underperformed theatrically, but Ford had pre-sold the international rights to Amazon upfront, covering a substantial portion of the budget before a frame was shot.

“Nobody’s gonna get hurt because we managed our risk upfront. And in some ways, although it wasn’t perceived as a success, it’s actually a good case study in risk management because that allowed me to partner with a world-class filmmaker on a risky film, and nobody got hurt.”

The same discipline applied to Rick Linklater’s Hitman, where Ford managed risk carefully going in, and made significant money as a result.

When Goetz asks Ford what drives him most, the answer is not the deal-making or the acquisitions. It is the library.

“We have a library. We’ve only been around for six years or so, but we own about 40 films and TV shows. We’ll own them forever unless and until we sell the library. And I can look at that and say, that’s a body of work that we created in a material way. And then as a business person, the fact that you’re creating an asset that is worth tens of millions of dollars, hopefully hundreds of millions of dollars one day — that’s a good way of getting yourself out of bed in the morning.”

Ford is bullish on the independent sector at a moment when many are not. He argues that studios have effectively ceded the market for intelligent adult drama, that streaming rights are beginning to be resold more efficiently across multiple windows, and that AI-driven cost reductions, combined with real-time dubbing technology, will unlock creative markets in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East that are currently capital-starved yet talent-rich.

“The independent film sector has always been the place where people take risks, where originality finds a pathway. And it’s hard not to be super optimistic about the creative potential of that in the coming years.”

His message for the next generation of filmmakers is direct. The demand for authenticity and originality is growing. But creative ambition has to be paired with financial responsibility.

“Responsible filmmaking doesn’t necessarily mean compromising on creativity. It just means doing it at the right number.”

The full conversation between Stuart Ford and Kevin Goetz is available now.

Before directing, Waugh spent six or seven years writing originals for some of Hollywood’s biggest producers, including Mark Gordon, Neal Moritz, and Jerry Bruckheimer. Rather than viewing that period as development hell, he saw it as essential education.

“I had this war chest of knowledge on a set. There’s nothing on a movie set you can’t tell me how it works. But I knew nothing about going into an executive’s office, pitching your wares, the development process. Those six to seven years were extremely vital to me.”

The turning point came during a frank lunch with his agent, Nicole Clemens, who told him his writing was getting worse. She pushed him to ask what he actually wanted to make. His answer was rooted in the cinema of Sidney Lumet, films that were commercial and entertaining but left audiences debating what they’d just seen on the way out of the theater.

“I wanna make movies that would entertain you, but you’d walk out of the theater, and you’d be talking about the subject matter. They weren’t preaching to you, they weren’t opinionated, they just showed you something, and they were about something bigger than just the popcorn of them.”

That conversation led directly to Felon, a film about the California prison system that Waugh researched by volunteering as a parole agent. He wrote it on spec, produced it on spec, made almost nothing, and did it all with newborn twins at home. It was the foundation of everything that followed.

The film that crystallized Waugh’s mission was Snitch, starring Dwayne Johnson. Both men were at similar crossroads in their careers, eager to break free of the pigeonholes their backgrounds had created. Johnson was coming off films that didn’t reflect who he wanted to be as an actor. Waugh was trying to figure out how to balance social relevance with commercial viability.

The answer came during a press tour panel with documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, who was promoting The House I Live In, a film about the same drug sentencing laws at the heart of Snitch. Jarecki told Waugh he envied him. “I’m playing in churches,” he said. “You’re on 2,500 screens.”

“That is really where it dawned on me that if you wanna be a theatrical filmmaker, if you wanna make commercial fare, it’s the responsibility to your partners, the people giving you that money. How do you do that and make something big, visceral, and exciting? But how do you thread the needle and put something that is intimate, thought-provoking, sometimes provocative, pushing people’s buttons? Each movie I go into, how do I hide the peas in the mashed potatoes?”

That mission statement has shaped every film since. In Angel Has Fallen, Waugh transformed a franchise entry into a meditation on mortality and professional identity, turning Gerard Butler’s Mike Banning into a pill-popping Secret Service agent struggling to accept that his time may be running out. In Shelter, he persuaded Jason Statham to strip away the quips and fast talk and sit in silence for the film’s opening act, embodying a man who has exiled himself from the world.

“We went through this period where it felt like everybody was 10 feet tall and bulletproof and impervious to pain, and they felt cardboard to us. So everything I’m trying to do is chip away at that and trying to make these action heroes people, normally everyday people with their own flaws, vulnerabilities, and humanize them in a way that they become us.”

Waugh’s process involves early and serious engagement with audience feedback. His long working relationship with Kevin Goetz and Screen Engine has shaped the way he thinks about storytelling from the ground up. Waugh doesn’t wait for formal test screenings to start listening. He shows early material to a small, trusted group, looks for common denominators in their reactions, and uses that information to identify what isn’t landing before it becomes a larger problem. That instinct extends to the set itself.

“God bless them, the filmmakers that can do 30, 40 takes. That is not me. And if by take five something’s not working, I stop. I literally stop and say, ‘We’re forcing something.’”

That philosophy was put to the test during the production of Shelter. A key scene introducing Jason Statham’s character wasn’t working. Rather than push through, Waugh cleared the set, sat down with Statham and his young co-star Bodhi Rae, and spent half an hour simply talking through what the scene was trying to say. They rebuilt it together from the ground up.

“And the fact that you can take a young actress like this and completely throw away what they had rehearsed and memorized, and then put a whole new kind of configuration together, and literally two takes later, you have this amazing scene that’s heartfelt, it’s witty, it’s on point. Sometimes we have to watch pushing things too hard, because when they’re not going together, what’s the black swan? What’s the reason they’re not landing? It’s taking a full step back and analyzing and getting a better perspective.”

Despite a first-look deal with Lionsgate, every film Waugh has made has been a negative pickup, independently financed and packaged before finding studio distribution. It is a model that demands resilience. Shot Caller nearly collapsed when Relativity Media went out of business mid-development. Waugh called his agent Graham Taylor, regrouped, and eventually packaged the film through Participant Media with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in the lead, a casting choice that prioritized acting ability over action-star recognition. The film found its audience.

“The ones that are scrappy, the ones that roll up their sleeves and dust themselves off and just keep going, that’s how you get things made. What I’ve been trying to figure out is when not to be a juggernaut. Because there are some times when you’re trying to force something that you put blinders on, and sometimes you gotta stop, take a full step back, get perspective, and go, ‘This is why this is not working.’”

As confident as Waugh is in his approach, he doesn’t pretend the current landscape is easy. Getting original stories in front of audiences amid fractured attention and declining traditional marketing is one of the industry’s defining challenges.

“How many people have the phone six inches from their face, and they’re not looking at billboards. They’re not looking at traditional marketing. They’re not looking at any of that. How do you tap into those people, but also in a way that you’re giving them a chance to understand this may be original IP that you’re doing?”

His answer, still evolving, centers on community. Build an audience early. Find people where they are. Don’t wait for them to come to you. It’s the same scrappy philosophy that has defined his entire career, applied now to the problem of making sure the films he fights to get made actually reach the people they were made for.

The full conversation between Ric Roman Waugh and Kevin Goetz is available now.

Wagner auditioned at every major studio before 20th Century Fox said yes. The credit goes largely to Helena Sorrell, his acting coach there, who pushed Darryl Zanuck to look at Wagner’s screen test a second time.

“She said, ‘Just take a look at it again and watch this.’ And he did, and he said, ‘Oh, Helena, if you think he’s right, then we’ll take him.’ So I was signed for $75 a week. 55 take home. God. But I was in the movies, and it was great.”

Fox put him through the full contract player treatment: acting classes, dancing classes, fan magazine features, tours, and small parts in big movies. Wagner also became the studio’s go-to screen test partner for incoming actresses, which is how he first met Marilyn Monroe.

“I did Marilyn Monroe’s two tests and that’s when I first met her. She was, by the way, a wonderful person.”

His real breakthrough came when Zanuck cast him as a shell-shocked soldier in With a Song in My Heart alongside Susan Hayward. Wagner had no lines.

“I said, ‘Mr. Zanuck, I don’t have any lines.’ And he said, ‘Well, I think people will come out of the theater, and they’ll say, who was that guy?’ And that’s what they did. And that’s what really set me off.”

Wagner speaks about the major figures in his life not as names to drop, but as people he loved and who genuinely helped him. Spencer Tracy is near the top of that list. After working together on Broken Lance, directed by Eddie Dmytryk, Tracy personally requested Wagner for The Mountain and gave him co-star billing above the title, a gesture that set him apart from the crowded field of attractive young contract actors competing for the same roles.

“He lifted me out of that. And I’m forever grateful to him for that.”

Wagner served as a pallbearer at Tracy’s funeral. His daughter Katie is named after Katharine Hepburn.

Fred Astaire is another figure whose presence in Wagner’s life has an almost fairy-tale quality. They met because Astaire’s son attended the same boarding school as Wagner, and Astaire would pick him up on weekends without Wagner fully registering who this extraordinarily kind man was. Decades later, filming It Takes a Thief in Rome, Wagner watched Astaire spontaneously dance through a grand ballroom for the crew.

“The crew was going, ‘Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred.’ And he started to dance, and he danced around the ballroom, kicked a couple of columns, you know, did the whole thing. Oh, it was fantastic. It was unbelievable.”

Wagner later cast Astaire as his father on that very show.

When Wagner was preparing to play a suave thief for It Takes a Thief, he went to Cary Grant for advice. Grant’s answer was simple: “He said, ‘Well, just do you.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He said, ‘Just play you. Don’t try to do anybody else.’”

Not every experience on set was warm. Wagner worked with John Ford, whom he acknowledges as a great director, but who had a habit of picking someone to torment on every picture. On that film, it was Wagner.

“I would have won the Academy Award if they put the camera on me when he knocked me down. I was so surprised. Here I was in this movie, and he was the number one director. And suddenly I’m on the ground, and he’s knocked me down.”

The incident occurred because Wagner glanced toward the music, following a stage direction in the script. Ford stopped the scene and hit him. Later, when Ford picked up a rock to throw at Wagner in a trench, John Wayne had to physically hold Wagner back.

“He says, ‘Just take it easy, kid. Take it easy.’”

Jimmy Cagney, whom Wagner had befriended before ever working with him by jogging his horses, was also on set and looked out for him throughout.

When the studio system collapsed and Fox dropped its contract players, Wagner took it in stride. Single at the time, he moved to Rome, where he worked with Sophia Loren and Vittorio De Sica and appeared in The Pink Panther, which he calls his all-time favorite film.

“Oh, we all had such a great time. Sellers — see him create that character, and he and Blake together create Clouseau.”

The pivot to television came at the urging of Lew Wasserman, who called Wagner into his office and made a case that was hard to argue with.

“He said, ‘You know, I want you to be in television. I want you to be in this TV Guide every week. I think this is your medium. I think this is right for you.’”

Wagner was skeptical. Television was considered beneath film stars at the time. But after meeting writer Roland Kibbee and reading the It Takes a Thief script, he came around. The show became a hit, and Wagner arguably became more famous on television than he had been in movies.

Hart to Hart came later, and Wagner fought hard to cast Stephanie Powers as Jennifer Hart over significant network resistance. They had doubts because of a previous series she’d done. Wagner didn’t waver.

“I wanted her to be Jennifer Hart, and so did Tom Mankiewicz. I had worked with her before when I did Thief, and I always liked her, and I thought the chemistry with us would be terrific. I just felt it.”

He also made a point of casting Lionel Stander, who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, as the show’s beloved Max. Wagner calls the Hollywood blacklist one of the industry’s biggest stains. Stander became one of his dearest friends.

And then, decades after his television peak, a whole new generation discovered Wagner in an entirely different way. His turn as the villainous Number Two in the Austin Powers franchise introduced him to audiences who may never have seen a single frame of It Takes a Thief or Hart to Hart – proof that a career built on range and instinct has a way of finding new life in unexpected places.

Wagner speaks with particular warmth about the women in his career. He had a three-year relationship with Barbara Stanwyck, whom he describes simply as “a marvelous lady and a great actress.” He’s characteristically gracious about it.

Bette Davis praised his work on It Takes a Thief in the New York Times at a time when she wasn’t working. Wagner called her.

“I said, ‘Bette, it was wonderful what you said about me and wound up in the Times. So would you like to do the show?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ So we wrote a character for her, she came out to Los Angeles, and she did this character for us, and she was great. And from that, she rolled into doing the shows on stage across the country.”

The episode’s most moving passages come when Wagner reflects on the personal losses and the people who brought him back.

“I thought I was finished when I lost Natalie. And I came back from that through my children and through Jill and through you and Neil, and it makes a big difference.”

After Natalie Wood’s death, Wagner gathered all the children together, including his daughters Natasha and Courtney, and Stanley Donen’s sons Josh and Peter, creating what Kevin calls a real-life Brady Bunch held together by love.

His wife, Jill St. John, whom he first met when she was 16 and under contract at Fox, is described with quiet reverence.

“I wanna tell you I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her. Because she really held me up when she came into my life.”

When Kevin asks what Wagner wants people to say about him at this point in his life, the answer is modest and completely in character.

“I’ve been so fortunate to be able to do what you wanna do in life. And it’s been good to me. I’ve been successful in it, and I’m just a very lucky and fortunate man.”

Few careers in Hollywood history span as many eras, genres, or legends as Robert Wagner’s, and fewer still have been lived with such grace and longevity.

The full conversation between Robert Wagner and Kevin Goetz on Don’t Kill the Messenger goes even deeper into the stories behind the stories, from the inner workings of the Fox contract system to the personal relationships that shaped one of Hollywood’s most enduring careers.

Bob’s early producing career in Canada started promisingly. His first films, including one with Michael Douglas called Running and another with Bruce Dern and Ann-Margret called Middle Age Crazy, were profitable before they even opened, thanks to clever exploitation of early video rights. He began to think the movie business was easy. He scaled up, brought in partners, raised more money, and things fell apart. He mortgaged his house without telling his wife. He had to let most of his staff go. He was left with one project: The Terry Fox Story, about a young Canadian who lost his leg to cancer and ran across the country before dying of the disease. The CBC wouldn’t make it because the script contained the word “shit.” Bob had nothing left to lose.

“There’s a great Chinese expression. The word in Chinese for crisis is the same word as opportunity. I’m in crisis, going broke. This turns out to be the biggest opportunity because it changed my career.”

He flew to New York and walked into HBO with a pitch: you can’t keep running old movies, you need to make something original. Out of desperation, he convinced them to try. The Terry Fox Story became the first original film in HBO history. It worked. And it opened a door that would define the next decade of his life.

Michael Fuchs, who ran HBO, had a simple mandate for Bob when he eventually hired him to head the original movies division: don’t bring me vanilla. Bob’s first film in the job was terrible. He called his wife from the parking lot before screening it for Fuchs, certain he was about to be fired.

“Michael watched it and laughed. He said, it’s really bad, but it’s not vanilla. And that gave me an opportunity.”

That gave Bob the permission he needed to think differently about what HBO movies could be. He looked at what they’d been making before he arrived and saw a pattern of small, forgettable films that weren’t standing out. He asked himself a simple question: what could I make that you wouldn’t see in a theater and you wouldn’t see on network television?

The answer came from something he’d learned hosting his Canadian news show: true stories. Not the safe, sanitized kind, but the challenging, cinematic, culturally resonant kind that studios wouldn’t touch and networks were afraid of.

“True stories, which people think, oh God, what do we need them? And if they’re sad, no one’s gonna watch. Looking back, that was the key ‘and.’ And so I began making films. The first one was The Josephine Baker Story. Josephine Baker was this Black woman from St. Louis who grew out of terrible poverty and terrible segregation. She moved to Paris, became very famous in France, and she came back to America. But no one wanted her. She fought segregation. She was one of only two women with Martin Luther King in ‘63. She became a spy on behalf of the resistance and was treated terribly here by J. Edgar Hoover because she was very critical of racism in America.”

The film was met with resistance inside HBO. Nobody knows who she is. Nobody cares. Bob made it anyway. When it worked, he and Fuchs looked at each other and said: we’ve got it. That was the template. Films like And the Band Played On, Barbarians at the Gate, and The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom followed, each one a project that conventional wisdom said couldn’t work. Bob came to see internal resistance as a signal, not a warning.

After nine years at HBO, Bob made the leap to features, becoming President of Tri-Star Pictures under Sony chairman Alan Levine. Six weeks into the job, Levine was let go. The incoming studio head, John Calley, had a personal grievance with Bob dating back to an HBO project that had gone badly. Bob read in the trades that he was likely to be fired before he’d barely started.

He survived long enough to make one lasting contribution. In a marketing meeting for Jerry Maguire, Bob sat silently while everyone around him debated why the film wasn’t testing well. It was being seen as a football movie or an Irish comedy because of the name. Jim Brooks, who was producing the film, pulled Bob aside afterward and pushed him to say what he was actually thinking.

“So finally, I blurted out: if it was an HBO movie, we would market this by theme. It’s quite simple. It’s a comedy about not selling out. Not only will our lead guy not sell out, but Renee Zellweger won’t sell out. What he says to her: I’ll stick with you, I’ll stick with your kid. And she says, that’s not good enough. It’s a comedy about not selling out.”

Brooks took that framing directly to Cameron Crowe, and the two of them spent Thanksgiving reworking the entire marketing campaign around it. Crowe later told Bob it was mathematically provable that the numbers completely changed.

Bob left Tri-Star after two years and got a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg almost immediately. He joined Dreamworks as head of development and production, working directly with Steven Spielberg.

One weekend, as he was leaving for Cabo, one of his executives stopped him and insisted he read a script. Bob resisted. The executive used one of his precious chits, the rare privilege Bob extended to his team to say, without explanation, you have to read this. The script was American Beauty.

“It was called American Beauty, but it was hard to pitch. And I got it. And I thought it was amazing. It was unique. It was so funny. It was moving. And thematically, it was about people who love, who can’t say they love, who can’t bring themselves. They have so much pain in them.”

Bob called Spielberg on a Thursday and asked him to read it quickly.

“He said, why do you want me to read it? You didn’t develop it. I said, I don’t want to develop it, I want to make it. He reads it that night. Seven in the morning the next day, he calls Walter Parks and me and says, this is really something, come into my office. And when he saw the first cut of the movie, he said, this is an Academy movie. He said it immediately.”

American Beauty went on to win Best Picture. Bob also brought Meet the Parents to Spielberg, who simply picked up the phone and called Universal’s Edgar Bronfman on the spot to acquire it. And he was among the first to see the potential in a nearly unpitchable script about four aliens who come to Earth and mistake a washed-up TV star for a real spaceship captain. That film became Galaxy Quest.

Late in the conversation, Bob arrives at the philosophy that has quietly guided everything he’s made. It starts with Babe.

“None of us are pigs that want to be sheepdogs. Why do we care? It’s because we identify with the pain of this poor pig trying to be something where people say, you’ll never be it. And he sort of wonders, but he does it. We all wonder, especially when we’re younger, can we be more than what people think we are?”

Pain, Bob argues, is the engine of every great story, including comedy. It’s what allows audiences to connect with characters whose circumstances are nothing like their own. It’s the reason a film about a pig can make adults cry.

This philosophy shapes his current project, a stage play about Bobby Kennedy in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination. The story centers on RFK’s profound guilt, his belief that his own crusades against the mob, against Southern segregationists, against Cuba had made his brother a target. Ethel Kennedy, overwhelmed by her husband’s grief, asked Jackie Kennedy to take Bobby away with her to Antigua. The play is about what happened there, and how Jackie brought Bobby back to life, in part through a passage from Aeschylus that RFK would carry with him for the rest of his life and that is now inscribed on his grave.

“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

Cooper’s introversion, the quiet reading, the thinking, the preference for being in the room over being at the party, produced something valuable: a genuine, deeply considered point of view about what makes stories matter. In a business full of people who can tell you what’s commercial, Bob Cooper spent forty years asking a different question. What hurts? And how do we make an audience feel it?

That instinct, built across careers in law, television, and film, across countries and decades and countless projects others said couldn’t be done, is his real legacy.

The full conversation between Bob Cooper and Kevin Goetz on Don’t Kill the Messenger goes even deeper into the creative philosophy of one of Hollywood’s most quietly influential executives, revealing how a lawyer from Montreal helped invent prestige television and found success by championing stories others wouldn’t touch.

Despite his father’s initial resistance to a film career, Chuck transferred to USC film school. His cousin taught a class called “director acts” where directors learned to work with actors. Chuck audited the class before making any of his own movies. One day, when a director’s partner didn’t show up, they asked Chuck to do a scene. He was offered a role in a student film that did very well, which helped him get into film school.

The turning point came with his third student film, which starred his best friend and his sister:

I showed it to my dad, and he had tears in his eyes when it was over, and he said, ‘I get it now.’

That moment of recognition from his father gave Chuck permission to pursue the career that would eventually lead to an Oscar.

Chuck’s first wife was Dawn Steel, who became one of Hollywood’s most powerful executives as president of production at Paramount Pictures. Her entry into entertainment is the stuff of legend. She started as the secretary for Larry Flynt. When the company had no consumer products division, Dawn pitched an idea:

“She came to Larry Flynt and said, ‘I have an idea. I think we should open up a consumer products division, which I would like to run. And I think the first idea would be to make the cock sock for the man who has everything.’ And it sold out. So she went merch. That was her first foray.”

When Flynt refused to give her a piece of the action, Dawn left and started her own company called “Oh Dawn.” Without securing rights, she created Gucci toilet paper. It sold out before Gucci’s lawyers shut it down. But the audacity caught Paramount’s attention, and they hired her to run their consumer products division. She was so good at merchandising that they moved her into creative development. Her first production executive movie was Flashdance. Within three to four years, she was president of production.

Chuck met Dawn at a premiere right after she’d been promoted. They had a fast courtship and got married. But their early marriage coincided with Chuck’s career struggles. After his acclaimed first film Heart Like a Wheel, his second movie, Made in USA, had a disastrous test screening at Paramount:

It was a 300-seat theater. And by the time the movie was over, there were about 50 people left. And she was not happy. She thought I had embarrassed her. She didn’t go, ‘Honey, don’t worry about it.’ That did not come outta her mouth. No, it came outta her mouth. ‘Listen, how dare you come to my lot and exhibit that.’ But we got through it.

Chuck describes this as probably his lowest point. Having a wife at the pinnacle of her career while he struggled with failure tested them both. Dawn went on maternity leave when their daughter Rebecca was born, and studio chief Ned Tanen used it as an excuse to push her out. Columbia came calling, and Dawn’s career continued to rise. But the experience shaped Chuck’s understanding of resilience and perseverance in Hollywood.

One of Chuck’s most brilliant early deals demonstrates his creative approach to rights acquisition. He wanted to develop Dick Tracy, but couldn’t afford a traditional option. Instead, he negotiated a 90-day escrow deal:

“I made a 90-day escrow deal. They put the rights to Dick Tracy in escrow for 90 days, telling both the Chicago Tribune and Chester Gould’s lawyer that I needed 90 days to check, because Dick Tracy was so old I needed to check the title for 90 days. So in those 90 days, I wrote a script with two other guys, sold it to Ned.”

Chuck’s breakthrough as a producer came with 12 Monkeys, based on Chris Marker’s experimental short film La Jetée. He flew to Paris to meet with the filmmaker and secured the rights. He hired screenwriters David and Janet Peoples, who delivered the script. But finding the right director proved challenging. Dawn had a terrible experience with Terry Gilliam on Baron Munchausen at Paramount. When Chuck sent Gilliam the script, and he loved it, Chuck had to deliver some news:

“I said, ‘Well, you need to know something.’ And he said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘My wife is Dawn Steel.’ And I don’t know how well you know Terry, but he’s got this cackle of a laugh. And so he says, ‘You know, Chuck, this is just another proof that there is no bridge you could burn in Hollywood.’”

Dawn was furious, but the movie moved forward. The bigger challenge was financing. Universal didn’t trust Gilliam with a $32 million budget. So Chuck pioneered a structure that became a template for independent financing:

“I went to what was then Polygram and the BBC for the UK. And then I went to TeleMunchen, which was German. And I went to Toshoku, which was Japan. I said, ‘You’re not just going to get your territory. You’re gonna get a piece of what Universal’s gonna distribute in the other territory.’”

Universal put in half the budget. Each international partner got their territory plus a piece of Universal’s worldwide distribution. Each territory covered its own marketing. The structure was brilliant because it spread risk while giving partners upside beyond their own markets. The movie cost $30 million and grossed $180 million worldwide. Chuck and his partners are still making money from the receivables.

After 12 Monkeys, Chuck’s success with City of Angels established him at Warner Bros. He also went into the music business with Bob Cavallo, forming Atlas Third Rail. The City of Angels soundtrack became the biggest record of the year, breaking the Goo Goo Dolls and earning three Grammys, including one for Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited.”

These successes led to something rare in Hollywood. Chuck started getting calls to join other producers’ projects. Jeff Robinov called him to produce Three Kings with David O. Russell at Warner Bros. The same executive called him for Batman Begins. Kevin Goetz reflects on what this means:

“For a producer in this town, to be invited to be a producer on something is probably one of the rarest, most affirming things that can happen. Because producers generate material. They’re a quote-unquote dime a dozen, but there ain’t a lot of Chuck Rovens.”

Chuck’s response reveals both humility and pride:

I’m not gonna deny that it doesn’t make me happy. It makes me very happy. And I’ve been blessed to work not only with incredibly talented guys like David Russell and obviously I think one of the all-time greats, Chris and Emma.

The Batman Begins partnership came through Chuck’s agent Dan Aloni, who also represented Christopher Nolan. Chuck had just produced Scooby-Doo, which was a nine-digit hit. Nolan’s biggest movie at that point was Insomnia at $30 million. Warner Bros. felt Nolan and producing partner Emma Thomas needed an experienced studio producer. Chuck had proven himself with both commercial hits and critically acclaimed films.

Chuck describes why Nolan became one of the few directors who can be a brand name:

“He’s just that brilliant. And he knows every aspect of making movies and writing scripts and he cares about every aspect. And also has a great partner in Emma who’s a great producer as well. Because she engages. And they don’t always agree, which is great. And by the way, it’s a subjective business, isn’t it? You can’t always agree.”

That last observation is crucial. Chuck values creative partnerships with healthy disagreement. Emma Thomas isn’t just supporting Nolan’s vision, she’s challenging it and shaping it. That dynamic produces better films.

Bringing Oppenheimer to Christopher Nolan

The Oppenheimer story begins with betrayal. During COVID, Warner Bros. executive Jason Kilar made a decision that destroyed the studio’s 22-year relationship with Nolan and Thomas. When Tenet was delayed by the pandemic, the question became whether to release it theatrically or simultaneously on streaming. Chuck was producing Wonder Woman 1984 at the time:

“My big question was, I need to understand if we’re gonna do simultaneous release, is it gonna be the whole slate or is it gonna be one movie depending on what the movie is? And in that meeting, Jason said, ‘No, I would never do simultaneous release on our tent poles. We’re going to deal with it one movie at a time.’ And I said, ‘Okay, fine. I’m in.’ Two weeks later he announced the whole slate as simultaneous release.”

Chuck felt betrayed. Nolan and Thomas felt even more so. The relationship with Warner Bros., which had produced the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Dunkirk, and other masterpieces, was over. That’s when Chuck made his move:

“Did you get a call to get involved in Oppenheimer? No, I brought Oppenheimer to Chris.”

Chuck recognized that Nolan needed a new home and a project worthy of his talents. He brought the Oppenheimer material to Nolan, and Universal embraced the partnership. The result was a film that earned 13 Oscar nominations and won 7, including Best Picture.

On Oscar night, Chuck approached the evening differently than he had for American Hustle, which received 11 nominations but won nothing:

“The last time I was nominated for Best Picture, American Hustle got 11 nominations and we didn’t get one. So you just went to have a good time. I said I don’t want to jinx anything. Who were you with? I was with my wife, Stephanie Haymes Roven. And I called her my secret weapon.”

When they won, it was Chuck’s first Oscar after decades of producing some of Hollywood’s biggest films. The validation meant everything.

The Value of Test Screenings

Throughout his career, Chuck has been a fierce advocate for test screenings with recruited audiences, even when working with directors who resist the process. Christopher Nolan doesn’t test his movies with recruited audiences, preferring friends and family screenings. But Chuck believes in both:

“I like to do a friends and family screening first and then go to an audience. But it’s invaluable to have an audience tell you what they’re thinking, and you learn a tremendous amount from it.”

Kevin breaks down why test scores matter more than most filmmakers realize:

“A definite recommend score that may be 20 points above the average or norm could be tens of millions of dollars. Audiences often can’t tell you how to fix it. They just tell you what’s not working. But you, as the creative producer, and the director need to figure that out.”

This philosophy was put to the test with Chuck’s latest film, Mercy, a thriller about an AI judge directed by Timur Bekmambetov. The film uses Bekmambetov’s “Screen Life” technique, showing everything through screens, cameras, and digital interfaces. Chuck tested the film multiple times, making incremental improvements each time. The breakthrough came when they listened to what the audience was really saying:

“First of all, we listened to the audience. The second thing that we finally did was we cut the denouement. We didn’t think we needed it. The coda, yeah. We didn’t think we needed it. It wasn’t buying us anything. It actually was raising more questions than it answered.”

The film ended at its most powerful moment instead of continuing past it. The audience had been telling them this all along, but it took multiple screenings to hear it clearly. Chuck’s partnership with visual effects company DNeg and its head Namit Malhotra led to another innovation. Malhotra suggested converting the film to 3D:

“We actually gave his company all of the visual effects, and at the end of it, he said, ‘You should seriously think about doing this in 3D.’ And I love that idea. And he put his money where his mouth was. He said, ‘I’ll give you test footage of the 3D that I’m talking about, and if you guys want to do it after that, I’ll make a financial deal with MGM and get a piece of that 3D business.’”

The 3D glasses made the Screen Life concept even more immersive, pulling audiences deeper into the unsettling world of AI surveillance. It was the kind of creative partnership that only happens when producers value collaboration and innovation.

Kevin Goetz describes Chuck as the consummate producer, someone involved in every stage from development through marketing and release. Chuck is on set every day, deeply engaged in post-production, and active in shaping how films reach audiences. This comprehensive approach is increasingly rare. Many producers focus on dealmaking or attach themselves to projects without doing the daily work. Chuck represents an older model of producing that requires relentless commitment.

That commitment has generated billions of dollars in worldwide box office and critical acclaim across four decades. Chuck has produced five of the 100 top-grossing films of all time. His body of work includes the Dark Knight trilogy, American Hustle, Three Kings, Suicide Squad, and now Oppenheimer. He’s currently producing Ramayana, one of the biggest films ever to come out of India, attempting to create the first non-American blockbuster that works worldwide.

Chuck’s producing philosophy combines the business lessons learned from his father with creative instinct and respect for audiences. He understands that great films require smart financing, strong creative partnerships, and the humility to listen when test audiences tell you something isn’t working. He knows that in Hollywood, there really is no bridge you can burn, so maintaining relationships matters as much as making great movies.

From the kid who surfed in Hawaii and rode horses on his father’s ranches to the producer who brought Oppenheimer to Christopher Nolan and won an Oscar, Chuck Roven’s journey demonstrates that hunger, passion, and smart dealmaking can sustain a legendary career across generations of Hollywood transformation.

The full conversation between Chuck Roven and Kevin Goetz on Don’t Kill the Messenger offers an even deeper dive into the producer’s creative process, revealing how one of Hollywood’s most successful producers built an empire on horizontal learning and unwavering tenacity.

Jon’s foundation for storytelling began at Chef Chu’s, his family’s restaurant in Silicon Valley that has been operating for 56 years. As the youngest of five children, often overlooked, Jon absorbed something deeper than recipes:

“This is an intersection of people where they’re coming to release, to celebrate, to mourn, to have a date, the beginnings, the endings of things. And they’re telling these stories in there to my dad because my dad and my mom are present the whole time. And then my parents are sharing them the story of us and what are the kids doing. And that relationship is why the restaurant has lasted for 56 years.”

Growing up in Silicon Valley during the 1980s, Jon witnessed engineers dreaming of the future before anyone was rich or famous. Those customers became his benefactors:

“Those people would hear about me making these little movies and they would say, Hey, you know, we’re working on these digital video cards. If your son is working on VCRs, let me give you this beta card to put in and let me give you the computer to put it in. Let me give you Adobe. People were giving me software before any other kid could get this stuff. Tens of thousands of dollars. And I was getting it, no manuals.”

This generosity shaped Jon’s worldview profoundly. He arrived at USC Film School with more advanced digital tools than the graduate students. But more importantly, it instilled a responsibility he carries today:

“There was a community beyond that and no one knew me, but they were rooting for me and waiting for me. And I always felt that responsibility and I felt so grateful. Like even when a restaurant gave us pizza for the lunches of our crew, ’cause we begged so many restaurants, in my head I would always say like one day when I can give pizza to a crew, I’m gonna do it. If a student crew wants to shoot in my living room, I’m gonna do it because I know how hard it is.”

Jon’s breakthrough came through his USC thesis film, a musical short called When the Kids Are Away about a young Michael Jackson witnessing his mother’s life. With a 20-piece vocal choir, 30-piece orchestra, and 20 dancers, the $17,000 production was funded entirely through donations, including a Princess Grace Foundation grant.

His agent Rob Carlson orchestrated the launch strategy. Rather than distribute the film, they held exclusive screenings at studios, inviting producers in Jon’s realm. When assistants attended and told their bosses about the film, demand grew. Within weeks, the screenings were packed. Steven Spielberg was never on the invitation list, but somehow he saw it. One Friday night, Jon’s agent called with news that Spielberg might have seen the movie and wanted to meet. The following Monday, Jon drove his green VW Bug through the Jurassic Park gates to Dreamworks:

“I sat in a room. He came in just him and I for the first probably 20 minutes before I could say anything about how much I loved him. He wanted to know how I did it. He wanted to ask me about certain shots. He wanted to ask me about certain edits, how I gathered the thing, where I’m from. He couldn’t have been more kind. He couldn’t have been more giving. Talked about musicals. We sang Where Is Love because he loves Oliver.”

Jon’s film school friend Jason Russell had coached him on one critical strategy. It’s not about the meeting, it’s about the second meeting. By the end of their conversation, Jon mentioned he had another musical project he’d love to share. Spielberg said Thursday. Jon had three days. What followed is one of the most memorable pitches in Hollywood history. Jon and his friends brought a chest of costumes to the Dreamworks conference room with Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald, Adam Goodman, and Mike De Luca:

“We bring a chest of costumes, plop it on the thing, we start walking them through every beat of this story. And every time we create a beat, we have this piece of cardboard with drawing on it or a printout and we’re putting it on the table. We’re putting things on the wall. And we had songs made by Bear McCreary that were playing on the thing. So we’re acting this thing out, we’re putting on costumes. It’s like Moulin Rouge when they do that whole pitch. It is that. It is so crazy.”

Mike DeLuca told them they should teach a class about pitching. Though that project (Moxie) never got made after two years of development, the relationship launched Jon’s career.

When approaching Wicked, Jon knew the cardinal rule from 20 years of Broadway. It’s about the girls, stupid. Everything the movie did had to serve Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship. Jon initially resisted pursuing major stars, wanting to discover fresh talent. But the technical demands were too high:

“The problem is when you go find the best out there, amateur wise, they are not experienced. And this actually took a high level of skill in terms of you couldn’t just have a great voice. You had to know yourself so well that you could switch back and forth from the dialogue into it. You had to do so well that you could hit those big notes and not ruin your voice.”

They needed professionals. Everyone had to audition, no direct offers. Jon didn’t call Cynthia Erivo early because he questioned whether she’d want to take on such a defining role and whether she could find the vulnerable, yearning side of Elphaba. When they finally met, they discussed something crucial. How had this character never been played by a person of color?

“When you have that perspective and you read these words, they mean very different things. Elphaba is the ultimate person of color. And she’s literally in color. And maybe people can’t take it in as easily if you have a person of color because they’re scared of that. It brings in too much of society’s ideas. But maybe that’s what we had to challenge.”

When Cynthia auditioned, Jon was blown away not by her powerful voice, but by her vulnerability and willingness to show wounds. More importantly, Cynthia brought something Jon hadn’t expected:

“I think Cynthia brought the most that was surprising through the process of this, with this idea of dignity to Elphaba. She has self dignity, which means she’s not a joke. She’s not coming in a black frock with dirt in her hair. She doesn’t live in a hole. She wanted jewelry, she wanted proper hair and makeup that she would do as a young person to present herself. If she didn’t have self-respect, we wouldn’t have respect for her or we wouldn’t root for her self-respect to be seen by everybody else.”

That principle of dignity transformed every design choice, from costumes to production design to how Elphaba lives in the world. With Ariana Grande, Jon initially resisted. After discovering stars in Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights, did he really want a global icon taking up all that space? Then she auditioned:

“Every time she came in, she’s up against the biggest movie stars in the world. She was the most interesting person in the room. She was not doing Kristin Chenoweth, but she was Glinda.”

Jon asked Ariana to come back four times because he needed to be sure. Her humor didn’t come from jokes but from deep understanding of who Glinda is:

“In real life, Ari is like sort of that Buster Keaton thing. Like she’s a sane person in an insane world. She’s both a product of this insane world, but her real life is the sane person. So she cuts so deep and so fast and she knows so much that it really is hilarious.”

Then Jon reveals something stunning. He never did a chemistry read between Cynthia and Ariana. He paired each of them with different actors to understand age ranges and humor compatibility, but never together:

“We got really lucky. We rolled the dice. The reality is I know enough that I feel like I think it can work, but at the same time, the camera loves energy, good energy or bad energy. And they were either gonna create sparks because they love each other or create sparks because they hate each other. Either way, it was sparks and I could work with it.”

The gamble paid off. The chemistry between them is one of the film’s greatest strengths.

to it.

Jon breaks down the intimate scene between Elphaba and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) that Kevin calls one of the most exquisite in recent memory. Every choice was intentional:

“In a fantasy that we are creating from the ground, we have to ask ourselves every single question. It’s not like we go to a location that feels like where she would live. We actually have to think, does she live in a dirt pile or does she live in the trees? No, she would live in the trees hidden away. She lives elevated. And then how well is she taking care of herself? She’s made a home for herself.”

When Fiyero enters and looks around, it’s not about sexual attraction:

“It’s about so much respect. She built a beautiful home for herself no matter what people said, how ugly this wicked witch is. Not ugly as in looks, but ugly as in spirit. She has this beautiful warm home and she’s self-sustainable in this. And then he goes over to her and he lifts the cape off of her. And you can feel the weight come off of her shoulders.”

The song “As Long as You’re Mine” transforms from a kiss-me-now ballad into something tender:

“It became a wishful sort of could they, would they sort of game. She wants that, but she doesn’t think he would ever want that. And then she observes him and then he looks at her and says, you’re beautiful. And she still doesn’t believe it… So it is a tenderness that becomes more sensual because of them coming together. They laugh and they play outside on the balcony and then they lift like a Warner Brothers cartoon when they’re in love because that’s her language.”

nities.

The conversation concludes with Jon delivering a passionate defense of theatrical exhibition that moves Kevin deeply. In an age of streaming and algorithms, Jon argues that movie theaters represent something irreplaceable:

“You have to put your phone down, you have to sit in the dark with strangers and you have to live through someone else’s eyes for two hours. I don’t even spend that much time with the people I love most to sit and listen to them for two hours. And yet movies have that space and this is the most important space that we need to protect. It is the movie theater where people can actually listen. And that space is so sacred. It’s where culture can change. I’ve watched it, I’ve witnessed it. It’s where people can challenge people and it can really be one of the last places where there is no algorithm on the inside of it.”

Jon’s vision isn’t nostalgic. It’s urgent. In a world increasingly mediated by algorithms and personalization, the shared experience of sitting in darkness with strangers remains one of the last places culture can genuinely transform.

Despite the massive undertaking of Wicked, Jon feels energized rather than exhausted. His upcoming projects include Oh, The Places You’ll Go! (his first animated film with JJ Abrams), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the Britney Spears biopic based on The Woman in Me, and a live-action Hot Wheels movie. When asked what’s next, Jon’s answer is simple:

“I’m ready to work. I’m ready to go shoot. I’m energized. I do not feel exhausted by the Wicked experience. I feel more free and more creative than ever.”

Jon M. Chu’s journey demonstrates that Hollywood’s greatest artists are built on foundations of gratitude and generosity. Sometimes they start in a Silicon Valley restaurant where engineers gave a kid beta video cards. Sometimes they require rolling the dice on casting choices that defy conventional wisdom. And always, they demand fierce protection of the sacred spaces where strangers gather in darkness to transform culture together.

The full conversation between Jon M. Chu and Kevin Goetz on “Don’t Kill the Messenger” offers an even deeper dive into the director’s creative process, from storyboarding techniques to the power of fatherhood in shaping storytelling.

The Eye-Opening Discovery

Stephen’s journey into film data analysis began with a favor for a producer friend who needed help with a business plan. What started as a research project became a career-defining revelation:

“He was a producer putting together a package. He knew I was number-literate and interested in doing this, and he said, Can you come and help me make a credible case for this movie? So I read the script and I started gathering data on all sorts of similar movies. And I kept proving that all the films I looked at lost money.”

Stephen assumed he’d made an error and went back repeatedly to check his calculations. But eventually reality sank in. The comparable films had all lost money. When he presented his findings, the response was unexpected:

“I sat down with him and I said, Look, I can’t explain why, but all of the films that are similar to yours have lost money. And he said, Yeah, I know I’m still gonna make mine. And I was like, oh, that’s why they lost money. Because people are making them for passion reasons, certainly on the lower budgets, and they’re not listening to the data.”

Kevin Goetz reinforced this, adding:

In any industry that you are driven by, the driving force of money is never a good idea. It is just not a good motivating factor for success. You have to have the passion and the goods behind it. But again, my theory is that why wouldn’t you try to make money each and every time out so that you could make another one, if for no other reason?

The Producer Experience Paradox

One of Stephen’s most counterintuitive findings came from research he conducted with Bruce Nash, who runs the website The Numbers. They partnered with the American Film Market to study whether producer experience correlates with film profitability:

“We looked at the correlation between the number of films a producer had made in the past and the chances of their next film being profitable. Because what you’d expect to see is experience equals better outcomes. And we found no correlation or even a slightly negative correlation.”

The findings were so unexpected that Stephen worried about publishing them. They told the American Film Market they’d proven that experience means nothing when it comes to profitability. Unlike other professions where poor performance has immediate consequences, failed producers often simply move to different investors.

Data Literacy and Hollywood

The conversation turned to whether filmmakers today are more open to using data. Stephen’s view was mixed:

“Honestly, I think they think they are. I’m not sure they actually are because I think that most of the people in the film industry are there for reasons in large part to do with passion, whether it’s art or passion for a story or because of a lifestyle.”

The influence of streamers and Silicon Valley over the past decade has increased awareness of data-driven decision-making. Stephen acknowledged this:

“We all do need to be far more data literate. But I would say that the core of being a film professional is about creating work that moves people, stories that move people.”

Kevin Goetz emphasized that the audience provides the ultimate accountability:

“The audience doesn’t care about any of this stuff. When it comes to the theater or watching it on TV, they’re ruthless. They’ll turn it off, they won’t buy it, they won’t recommend it. Or if you make something that moves people, they’ll tell everyone they know, they’ll buy it again.”

One of Kevin’s most thought-provoking statements came when discussing his research:

“Somebody asked me the other day in an article promoting the book, Are you ever wrong in your assessment of movies? I said, I’m wrong every day. I’m always wrong. The audience, on the other hand, is never wrong. And I mean that because all the audience is doing is giving you their opinions, their unfettered opinions based on what they’re seeing.”

Stephen added:

“If you’re genuinely trying to make a good piece of art, you’re trying to make a responsible business decision, you’re trying to make a sustainable career with people who are gonna trust you, you absolutely should listen to it. The questions that you really want to ask is not, Do you think this will make money, but what evidence would change your mind about the investment?”

Data as Weather Forecast

When Kevin asked about the biggest misunderstanding filmmakers have about data, Stephen’s answer was direct:

“They think it’s prescriptive and it’s not. It’s just the weather forecast. And that means two things. Number one, it means that it might be wrong, but also it means that even if 19 out of 20 things have failed, first of all, not all of them failed. But also everything is based on the past performance. Pirates don’t work until Pirates of the Caribbean. Historical films don’t work until Gladiator.”

Stephen elaborated on why understanding expectations matters:

I think the question to ask is what will your audience be expecting from your film? And then part two, what are you gonna do with that expectation? If they’re turning up to a western, you’ve titled it a certain thing, you know the color of the poster. Based on the information the audience are gonna get, they’re going to expect this kind of journey. Secondly, what are you going to do with those expectations?

Stephen used the example of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, a film with horror elements that was marketed as big-budget science fiction. The result was audiences feeling mis-sold, even though the film itself might have worked with proper positioning.

First-Party Versus Secondary Data

This discussion highlighted the complementary nature of Kevin and Stephen’s approaches. Kevin explained:

“This is why my book focuses on the pre-greenlight stage. What you’re referring to is marketability, which very few filmmakers have any control over. So the difference of our interpretations is really centered on using secondary data after the movie’s released, looking back on it. As opposed to stuff that I’m doing, which is more first-party data, talking to hundreds, thousands, I don’t know, could be in the millions of moviegoers over nearly four decades.”

Kevin’s work involves testing concepts and films with audiences before release. Stephen’s research analyzes patterns across thousands of completed films using existing reviews and ratings. Both approaches provide value at different stages of the filmmaking process.

What Audiences Really Want

Stephen’s analysis revealed a gap between what audiences say they want and what they actually respond to:

“I think people will say they want things that are more complex than they actually want. When you ask people what do you want from a movie, they might give you a highfalutin answer. But if you look at their behavior, what they actually want is to be entertained and immersed and to live a life with somebody else.”

Kevin illustrated this with the iPhone analogy. If Steve Jobs had asked people what they wanted, they couldn’t have described a smartphone. But once they saw one, they immediately wanted it.

Genre as Emotional Shorthand

Both Kevin and Stephen work extensively with genre analysis. Stephen’s description captures the challenge:

“Genre is such a broken system that works in the sense that whenever you try and pick it up, it’s like sand between your fingers. And yet we all know what it is. So I think of genre as a shorthand to the emotional experience. What’s the difference between thriller and action? The lazy answer is the budget. The real answer is to do with emotional danger. I think a thriller is unsettling, whereas an action film doesn’t necessarily have to be.”

The key insight is that genre matters most for packaging and marketing. Once audiences are in the theater, you can take them on nuanced journeys. But if you promise them something through genre signals and then don’t deliver, you’ve created a problem.

The conversation’s deep dive into horror films revealed why this genre poses unique challenges. Stephen’s analysis found something surprising about average shot length:

“Obviously the shortest genre is action. But the longest was horror. When I initially did it, I was a bit surprised. And then I realized, that’s because you can’t see around the corner. You have to wait until that thing comes out. Horror is essentially about controlling everything the audience know and feel.”

Kevin shared insights from testing thousands of horror films. The most common problems are failing to declare the genre early enough and not including enough actual scares. When filmmakers describe their horror movie as “kind of a psychological thriller,” it’s usually code for “not very scary but intriguing.”

Elevated Genre

Kevin introduced the concept of elevated genre films:

“What I’m sensing is that what is working now in the theaters is elevated this or elevated that. It’s elevated horror, it’s elevated comedy, it’s elevated drama. It’s why Oppenheimer, for example, as a drama has a very underlying tension and intensity that elevates it.”

He added that films like M3GAN succeeded by adding humor to the horror formula. The question for any genre film is whether you’re delivering enough of the core experience.

Peak-End Theory

Stephen introduced a psychological concept with implications for filmmaking:

“There’s a theory called Peak-end theory, which is that the two bits that people remember most of an experience is the peak and the end. My theory is when those two align, when the ending is the peak, it creates an extra like the feeling squared. You look at movies like Argo, I think quite an average movie with a terrific ending went on to win Best Picture.”

Kevin discussed what he calls “zombie endings,” where films leave audiences hanging ambiguously. These rarely work because audiences need to feel pushed in a direction.

When discussing what makes endings satisfying, Stephen described a balance:

“Those two things can also be in conflict sometimes. But they have to resolve. You have to feel like there was a literal truth to it. It has to make sense, but it has to be an emotional truth to it as well. It has to feel like it works.”

Every Movie Should Make Money

Kevin’s theory provided a framework for the entire conversation. He believes every movie, if made and marketed for the right price, should make money. This philosophy doesn’t mean avoiding niche subjects. It means accurately sizing the market and budgeting accordingly.

One of Stephen’s key findings was the distinction between productive mystery and problematic confusion:

“There’s a big difference between mystery and confusion. We like mystery. Not knowing is fine, but confusion is uncomfortable. And even in a horror film, confusion can’t last a long time.”

Kevin calls this “intrigue versus frustration.” Good confusion makes audiences lean forward. Bad confusion makes them check their phones.

Stephen emphasized that maintaining a consistent tone doesn’t mean painting with a single color:

“Think about when you’re listening to a randomized playlist on Spotify. If it suddenly has some other tune that you weren’t expecting, it will feel incredibly discordant. Even if it’s a tune you like. It’s the same with a movie because fundamentally, one of the biggest things I’ve found across all genres is about immersion.”

Kevin felt that filmmakers should establish tone as early as possible to give audiences permission to respond appropriately.

The Future of Film Data

The conversation between Kevin Goetz and Stephen Follows demonstrates that data and artistry aren’t opposed forces. They’re complementary tools for understanding what resonates with audiences.

Stephen’s Greenlight Signals provides filmmakers with patterns distilled from thousands of films using secondary data. Kevin’s How to Score in Hollywood offers practical guidance for testing concepts and films with real audiences before significant resources are committed. Together, these approaches give filmmakers better ability to make informed decisions.

The key is remembering that data provides weather forecasts, not prescriptions. Past performance informs but doesn’t dictate future success. Genre conventions matter but can be subverted thoughtfully. Audiences want to be entertained and immersed, but the specific form that takes can vary.

Both men emphasize that ignoring audiences entirely usually leads to financial failure. You don’t have to follow every data point or test recommendation. But understanding what audiences expect and what patterns have emerged across thousands of films provides useful context for creative decisions.

As Kevin noted at the end of their conversation, he and Stephen are approaching the same mission from complementary angles. Both want to help filmmakers make movies that connect with audiences and generate enough profit to enable more filmmaking.

The full conversation is available now on Don’t Kill the Messenger. For more information about Stephen Follows and his research, visit stephenfollows.com. Kevin Goetz’s books, Audienceology and his upcoming How to Score in Hollywood, are available on Amazon and at kevingoetz360.com.