Cleopatra and Joseph Mankiewicz

A second connection from Uncle Phil landed Ganis at 20th Century Fox, where he found himself in the thick of the famously chaotic production of Cleopatra, working under publicity executive Jack Brodsky. Years later, fate brought him into sustained collaboration with the film’s director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, on one of Mankiewicz’s final films. Ganis recalled that Mankiewicz “Taught me about life and life in Hollywood and his disdain, always with a smile, for Hollywood. Joe, one of the greats.”

Ganis describes that period with a reverence for the business itself, for the people and the relationships that came with it:

“Kevin, you know what? Let me just say something here. We can go on and talk forever and I hope we do on this podcast. But I’m absolutely grateful in my life to have worked for Joe. I worked in this incredible world that you and I live in and work in and now working with my wife.”

Meeting George Lucas Pre-Star Wars

One of the defining relationship of Ganis’s career began at a private Warner Bros. screening room in the mid-to-late 1960s, where Francis Ford Coppola invited him to see a short film called THX 1138. In the back of the room stood a quiet young man Coppola introduced simply as George:

“He showed me that short and a couple other people he invited and he said in the back of the screening room, there’s the guy, his name is George Lucas… This little guy, I mean slim, little, quiet guy said, ‘Hello.’ And I said, ‘Hello.’ And that was that for a number of years.”

Years later, after the release of Star Wars, Lucas called. Ganis joined Lucasfilm just as The Empire Strikes Back was going into production, eventually shuttling between Los Angeles and San Francisco to oversee marketing on both the Star Wars films at Fox and the Indiana Jones films at Paramount. It was during those trips to Paramount, marketing Raiders of the Lost Ark, that Ganis met Nancy Hult, then working in public broadcasting in San Francisco. The two were introduced through a PBS fundraiser built around the documentary Ganis had produced on the making of the film, a project that won him an Emmy.

An Audience Lesson from Ghost

By the time Ganis became President of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group, he had built a career-long thesis around one idea: nobody, no matter how experienced, can fully predict what an audience wants.

“You never quite know what an audience wants. You have a sense of what an audience wants and then you work off that sense, but you never quite know what an audience wants.”

He illustrates the point with a story about a test screening of Ghost at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where veteran researcher Joe Farrell predicted the film would fail just minutes before the cards came back overwhelmingly positive:

“Joe Farrell looked at me and he shook his head, no. He said, ‘Nope,’ and walked away. He was saying to me, ‘Sid, this movie’s not gonna work.’ That’s what Joe said, the predictability and unpredictability. Joe Farrell, I revere him, everybody listening and watching this. He said, ‘No.’ And then the audience said, ‘Yes.’”

Ghost went on to become one of Paramount’s biggest hits, and during that same period at the studio, Ganis also acquired the underlying rights to Forrest Gump.

Why He Never Left Marketing

Despite running studios and eventually becoming an independent producer, Ganis stayed rooted in the marketing and public relations branch of the Academy rather than moving into the executive or producers branch. He credits that discipline with teaching him the one lesson that mattered most across every job he held:

“That’s why that’s such a great branch and such a great discipline to know because it teaches you the kind of the main thing. You know, what does an audience want? What’s an audience looking for?… When you’re in marketing, you gotta sell it. You gotta convince an audience to come around. And when you have the goods, man, when the story is good, and the work is fine, man, you know you got something.”

Building the Academy Museum

After two years running Paramount, Ganis stepped away to become an independent producer before being recruited by Peter Guber and Jon Peters to Columbia Pictures. He eventually served four consecutive terms as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But when asked what he’s most proud of in his long career, Ganis doesn’t point to a single film. He points to a building:

“The thing that I’m most proud of is that Academy Museum of Motion Pictures… that’s sitting there on Wilshire and Fairfax. And I’m most proud of it because it’s now open about four years and for 17 years before that I and a bunch of others…kind of in the forefront of it.”

The idea began with a single sentence from screenwriter Frank Pierson, and Ganis spent the better part of two decades carrying it forward, calling it, by the end, a legacy he’s leaving the business. He’s equally candid about the moment he learned he’d be Academy President, recalling the phone call he made to Nancy from a desk phone the moment the board meeting ended:

“I picked up the phone, dialed Nancy at home, and I said, ‘Hey, Nance, I’m the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.’ She said, ‘Great. Get Jon Stewart.’”

A Career Built on Gratitude

What Ganis shares throughout the conversation is less a strategy than a sensibility: a refusal to hold grudges, a continual return to the people who helped him along the way, and an insistence that none of it was inevitable. As Ganis puts it, reflecting on his life in the business:

“My gratitude and my gratitude to everybody around me and the people in my life who have helped me through this business.”

From a 25-cent ticket at the Nostrand Theater to marketing some of the most influential films ever made to helping build the institution that now houses Hollywood’s history, Sid Ganis’s career suggests that staying close to the audience, and staying grateful to the people who open doors, is its own kind of genius.

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