Former Paramount President Disrupting Hollywood

The team behind Invisible Narratives. It's a digital content studio. It's co founded by Adam Goodman, former president of Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks SKG. Andrew Sugarman also is one of the co founders. Former Walt Disney Executive vice president Global Digital Media and Publishing. Adam joining us on the phone from Los Angeles. Adam, so great to have you here with us. How are you and what has COVID done

to your world? It is thanks for having me. It is literally turned everything that we know about how you make something and turned it upside down, shook it and around owned and uh and turned it all around. It is. It is the most disorienting and most exhilarating at time I think that I've ever been in the entertainment industry. Well, and you were producing a movie at least through part of this. The pandemic, of course, isn't over. And Songbird, Uh, your film that's coming out was one of the first

to go back into production after full lockdown. Can you just tell us a little bit about what that was, like, what kind of protocols did you have to put in place? Give us some insight. It was imagine an operating room and uh. And the system that our co producers and and and that's created in the situation was to try to mimic the amount of people and resources that were needed directly in the operating room or people that were outside.

Maybe we're a little bit um less essential. They were tested a bit less frequently, They had less access to our cast, into our direct crew, and so we created these zones. And so there was a sea zone and the zone and in a zone and uh. And it was very frustrating because again, movie crews have great rhythm and great speed and efficiencies at which a hundred years

of making movies has nearly perfected. And this kind of scrambled that process because now all of a sudden you couldn't get to a certain place on a set, You had to pass things along, you had to invert literally the way in rhythm of how everything was done. So it was it was really challenging, but thankfully we got through it and made a great movie in the process of it. Yeah, really fascinating. I mean to hear you know kind of how you figured out how to get

it done. And we've talked to some other people who have done some some filming too, and that's what it all came down to, is really creating these zones to make it, make it happen. So so where are you are you able to get new productions going give us an idea of what the flow is like. The flow is actually starting to get back to normal. I think smaller, more nimble productions are having more success and more safety on the set just simply because it's less people coming

in contact with each other. But there's been a number of productions that have wrapped since Songbird with with great track records, and people are really modifying. And the one thing movie crews are is they're resilient and they're creative, brilliantly creative, and so the systems and teams that people have put together to identify the right way back and forward is really working now at this place. So I

think that we're still making movies. We completed a horror movie that we actually released on Thursday, and um, and we're back. I mean we're we're back in a different sort of way. The movie theater business is upside down, but but everything else is starting to starting to move in more normal ways again. Well, on that movie theater business, you're also releasing some of this contact on direct consumer platforms.

Is that the future? Is it going to be not just in theaters, but you're going to be able to access it online right away. I can't speak to, you know, to big budget productions, which I've certainly been involved with and have my fair share of experience with, but I will tell you that there has never been a greater generational shift between consumers and people who are content consumers

and people who are making content decisions. Now, you know the amount of time that young people have spent during this pandemic watching gaming online, or influencers online, or making TikTok videos or Instagram stories. It's unparalleled. And it's time for content creators on a professional side to understand that

traditional is shifting. So we're really trying to blend a trae digital mode, which is take the best of storytelling and and content creation through years of practice and experience, but do it in ways that are specific to audiences that really are underserved right now and give it big events that can be things that are different than what they would get because the movie theaters aren't open in

their towns. Adam, we left off talking about this generation, the TikTok Instagram generation, and how you have to reach them differently. Your company focuses specifically on that gen Z audience. How is their taste and consumption different they there, This is the first generation that that has no gatekeepers in front of them. When they want to tell a story or they want to publish something, they can distribute directly to an audience of friends, and sometimes those friends become fans,

and sometimes those fans create superstars. And this audience is is used to watching things in a different way and they're used to consuming things in a different way. So we decided that what made most sense was to go after stars that were not stars in a traditional sense. But we're stars for our kids and young people. So we partnered with Phase Plan, which is of the biggest gaming lifestyle groups on the planet right now, and made

a movie with Phase. Rug is one of their biggest, one of their biggest stars, that's got over thirty million followers across his various social platforms. But we paired him with a guy named Greg Pokin, who I made all the Paranormal Activity movies with. And so I was really trying to combine, you know, great storytelling but also next generation storytellers, to put those two together and try to do something a little bit different. And what kind of

stories do you find that they're most interested in? I noticed Songbird, the movie you have coming out is a thriller Crimson. The other one is a horror film. Is that what's hot right now? It's storytelling is storytelling, And if I knew what was going to work in storytelling, I would I would be on my yacht from this song called not Second Office right now. I think that's

the one thing. I think, the one thing I do feel strongly about though, is the way content is consumed is different, and therefore the way we make things have to be different. You can't make things and try to reach as broad of audiences as you used to. You need to make things that are much more local in terms of their scale and spirits. So you're making things

for a small audience of highly engaged fans. And additionally, it can't be created with so much artifice that you have a food stylist who's putting sesame seeds on the bun to make the bun and the hamburger look delicious. Instead with kids that they're used to reel now, and so we spent a hundred years in the movie business trying to make everything look perfect, and now when kids can shoot things from their backyard, they just wanted to

look real and authentic. But they still need storytelling running throughout it. So how do you see content than evolving? Because I do feel like you still have the major studios and the big franchise is right, and they're spending, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars a lot of money. And yet I agree with you that you could go after a niche audience and do really well um in terms of content. So how do you see it kind of playing out

over the next years. At them, they're over six hundred thousand people right now that have social media reaches of over a million people. And if you look at the traditional studios or streamers, they're barely scratching the surface of that six thousand group of people. Maybe there's a comedian here and there, but all these really talented people with with with massive fandoms are looking for reasons and and

opportunities to create events. They can't do it on their own, you know, on on YouTube or Instagram because outside of their AdSense or brand deal, there's really no financial incentive for them to do it. And they can't get recognized that the big studio system because they're not big enough where they don't have the Q factor that young executives know who they are. So we're really trying to establish an opportunity for these creators to have something in the

middle that kind of exists between Netflix and YouTube. So when they have something that's a bigger scale or event that there's an opportunity. And then it's not just about buying a movie, it's about buying a sweatshirt. It's about buying something that that merch of some sort that goes with to allow them to really be proud of who they support and to see something that comes along with it, but to have something tangible in their hands, to walk away to say I was there for this event. It happened,

and I was a part of it. So one thing I do want to ask you, because we've just seen so many new streaming services come on board in the last six months, I feel like it's been maybe a year um and also the news that Disney is just kind of all in on digital, how do you think this impacts kind of the world here in terms of content creation. I think theatrical is under great jeopardy right now.

I think it becomes very difficult. If you're in a movie studio job and you don't have a digital distribution arm in your in your arsenal, then you can't green light movies when there's no distribution path to get those

films out. So studios that don't have, you know, don't have an HBO Max or a Peacock or whoever it is that they can release something online Disney plus, then it becomes it becomes stalling and and and they're frozen, and so it forces them to become production companies for streamers. Which is really you know, it's it's it's it's kind of bizarre to think about considering how fast this shift happened. Yeah, right, Well, one streaming company we saw that it hasn't worked out.

We got news just this week Quimby is winding down that short form video streaming. So clearly streaming doesn't always work right. There are some formats of it that don't have that take up. So how do you how do you differentiate yourself so that your content does have that pickup? And you're part of the DreamWorks SKG team, I mean, you know, Katzenberg, I'm just curious, like what happened. Well,

I can't speak to that. I can tell you Jeffrey is honestly one of the smartest and those men of people I've ever worked with, and so I don't I can't speak to the Quimby story. I can answer our story in that we don't have to find our audience. We're we're advertising, and we're working with stars who we know exactly who their fans are, where they subscribe, where they live, and so our whole content you know, kind of strategy right now is to make content for audiences

that we know where they are. We're not trying to tap new people or trying to convince someone to show up for something they don't like. We're going after an engaged audience and and and hitting them up in a place where they already are. We're not asking them to to to move someplace until until the event time, but before that, we're really creating. The reason why the company is called Invisible Narratives is we're creating invisible story arcs that live on these kids channels so that they start

to build a story propulsion. So they're driving to Invice dot tv, which is our platform where we combine merch and the content. But they're going there because it's a curtain that they want to get behind, because they've been taken up in the storytelling right and the sort of and and so they are moved to it by their interest in story. Adam, come back. As you guys continue to do things and you've got new developments, come on back and tell us how it's going, because it's really fascinating.

I agree with you. Like this whole space just being disrupted, Uh significantly. Adam Goodman, former president Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks skg Uh, co founder of Invisible narratives joining us on the phone from l A. I mean, man, it's just kind of interesting how it's all changing. You made it. You made it for hours I did. Monday is over, Carol. It's always a tough one, all right, everybody for Kaylee Lines,

I'm Carol Masser. Have a safe evening. And you, of course are listening to Bloomberg Business Week, and this is Bloomberg Radio.