|
BARRY M. MEYER: Extended Interview
I graduated in 1967 and really had no idea what kind of law I wanted to practice.
Those were the days when, if you had a law degree, it was just a matter of choosing the job you wanted. There were a lot of opportunities.
ABC had an opening in their legal department. I never imagined working for a company. I always imagined working for a law firm.
My dad’s advice to me was that the job at ABC sounded like something I would regret if I didn’t take a shot at it. He said if it didn’t work out, I was young enough that I could always do something else.
Literally, my first job was to read printed forms of sales agreements to look for typos.
Those contracts were so informative—if you read them carefully, which I did, they laid out the whole concept of selling time and contractual relationships between advertisers, networks, and programming.
The television business grew at a very rapid rate. Anything that grows at a rapid rate leaves a vacuum as it goes along. It leaves spaces as it goes along the way. If you are able to fill in those spaces, you can get a lot of experience in a very short time.
I eventually graduated to the program development side of the business. I was not really practicing law. It was transactional. I was more of a deal maker, a negotiator. I negotiated for licensing agreements between the network and independent producers, studios, and advertisers.
When I first came to Warner Bros., I was associate director of business affairs for television. We had no television programming on the networks at that time. We were just beginning.
The first hit that really put us on the map was Alice—based on the movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Then Wonder Woman and The Dukes of Hazzard.
I’m very aware of the fact that it is important for customers to feel—and to know—that the company is run by people with creative input and not only business sense.
We all live by our creative integrity.
I think a law degree teaches you ingenuity, how to think, how to analyze problems, how to look at a situation and decide how best to cope with it.
A law degree is the credential to get the job. Once you’re in the job, the credentials are no longer important. You have to rely on your skills.
Our legal system is basically an adversarial system. There are two sides fighting hard, and out of that comes the truth. Yes, the system should be about fighting for your point of view, but it also should be about building consensus. Because truth is rarely absolute.
Look at a company like Warner Bros. now. It is a big, vertically integrated conglomerate.
We started at a point with no television programming on the air, and, in the past year, we provided over 2,300 episodes of television, more than any other company in the world.
Now it’s not so much a question of my getting a chance to look over individual movie scripts or television pilots, but once a movie slate or TV slate develops, I look at it going forward. I look at how it fits our overall strategic plan for the next few years.
The WB television network was part of an overall television strategy to provide a platform for the programming we and others produce.
I see my strong suit as stepping back to provide long-range strategic vision and to find, hire, and support creative people.
I don’t like to micromanage. I’m a firm believer in finding the best people I possibly can and supporting them and getting out of their way.
The biggest misconception about me is that I am just a hard-nosed, driven-by-numbers business executive. I try to step back and look at the studio as a whole organic being. Studios are complex global enterprises that require leadership, strength, and vision.
I try to lead the studio in the direction in which I think it can grow by taking reasonable risks.
So much of my day is spent dealing with people, not just issues. It is important to spot the issues and deal with the issues, but it’s more about dealing with people than with issues.
Most revenue for Warner Bros., sixty percent or more, is generated outside the United States.
The issue of runaway production starts with the supposition that you should do all of the production in the United States. It would be much more comfortable to do it all right here on the studio, but it won’t work creatively or financially, and, when so much of the revenue comes from all over the world, you should be producing all over the world.
It’s better for us to be local partners than cultural imperialists.
We fight every day about gratuitous smoking, gratuitous language, gratuitous sex. We don’t win all the fights, but where it is gratuitous, and doesn’t add to the story, we press very hard with filmmakers.
We used to make videocassettes in real time. Now we make DVDs in seven seconds, with much higher quality.
Piracy is an enormous watershed issue for the whole industry.
Digital technology is a great boon for the industry, but the downside also is that it’s easily copied, easily recorded with digital cameras in movie theaters and posted on the Internet. Anyone in any country can pull a movie down from the Internet and it only takes them seven seconds to duplicate it, so it can be on the market in the same day.
We try to educate people to the fact that downloading a movie or music or computer software illegally is theft. Just because it’s easy and convenient and there’s little likelihood of being caught—it’s still theft.
We’ve started education mostly on college campuses. It’s not the demographics of the youth audience per se that we’re targeting, but it just happens to be where the fastest networks are.
The entertainment industry is an economic driver for the entire American economy. I don’t think people view it as such, but it is the third or fourth largest export business in the country.
There is no country in the world that the American entertainment industry doesn’t have a positive balance of trade with.
I think very few people really understand how big and important a part of the American economy the entertainment industry is, and that’s why it deserves protection.
If I look back, I think one of my biggest accomplishments was building a television business for this studio that started at ground zero, from nothing on the air to the biggest in the industry, by far.
I also think one of the big things I accomplished was global expansion. I realized growth for Warner Bros., and the entertainment industry in general, was more likely to occur outside the United States.
China is a very interesting place and very important for us. I would like to spend more time there.
My family and my children are the biggest joys in my life.
I dread the uncertainty of the world we live in. It’s very hard to live in a world where your personal safety is in question all the time. We were spoiled in the United States for so long. We didn’t have to live with this as a fact of life every day.
Whatever you do in life, the important thing is to be there, to invest in it, to show up. Whatever direction, by design or by chance, you have to invest yourself in it.
If I could be any Warner Bros. character, Martin Sheen in The West Wing would be the easy answer. He’s the president everyone wants: thoughtful, concerned, compassionate, tough. If I was an animated character, it would have to be Bugs Bunny. I figure he’s smarter than the rest. In the end, he’ll win. Whatever it is, he will succeed. 
As told to Paula Baughn
|
