Oh g is, folks, it's showtime.
People say good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater.
They want closed soda, pop, popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booths.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Cut it off, Hey, folks, Welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth.
I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I am talking with Bill Burke. He is the founder of the Optimism Institute.
Talk to him a little.
Bit about optimism and his podcast, talk a lot about his early days over at AMC N TCM aka Turner Classic Movies. Had a great time talking with me. Burke, and I hope we have a great time listening to it. Thank you so much and enjoy this interview. As somebody named Mike White, there's a lot of Bill Burke's out there, so yes, who are you Bill Burke? Tell me the Bill Burke story.
Please. The most famous and growing up was Billy Burke, who played the good Witch of the Doors and apparently she had that funny movie Apparently that was her voice and she was just singing in the rain character. She was a big star in silent movies. And then I went they went to talkies that voice sidetractor. But anyway, I was sharing with you off the interview. I was born in Detroit and moved when I was only three
years old, but it was a rabbit Detroit fan. Grew up around the media business, so my late father, we were in Detroit, sy ran radio station there WJR. Moved to New York where he built his career, and I grew up around media. Watched way too much television when I was a kid, loved movies, read the TV and variety of trades when I was like en and so just always. My dad didn't steer any of us into that world, but just naturally gravitated towards it, and so
had summer jobs in the field. Took full advantage of the lucky connections I had, And then when I was getting out of business school, I wound up getting a job at Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta, and I was in charge of new business development. And probably a big part of the reason you ever found me was that business
plan I developed. It was not my idea, but I developed a business plan the sort of numbers behind turd classic movies, and in the early nineties, cable was the wild West and Ted was the cowboy ready fire aim. We were just doing stuff and this got approved, this business plan, and I wanted to stay with the network, and my boss was like, he reported to Ted, they would just keep going and what do you mean, we'll
start hiring people. So basically I was the de facto general manager when we started Turner Classic Movies and reporting to Gunny brad Siegel who was running T and T and so from there that was just the creatiest ride launching that channel, and then was promoted to run TVs Superstation. IF actually was in the new media part of Time War,
but frankly got disillusion with big corporate life. Left are just started off for a while, then came back to Atlanta, ran the Weather channel companies for a couple of years, and then left there and moved back to Maine. Wanted to be a writer, maybe teacher. This a very long answered, a very quick question. Good.
I asked for the life story. You've given it to me, though, this is pretty quick for that.
Yeah, I gets self continent so then, But anyway, I wrote an article about leadership lessons I learned from Ted Turner sent it to him via his secretary twenty five pages. She called back in about five minutes and said, Ted wants to talk to you. And he gets on the phone. He said, I love what you wrote bound this says great. I want you to write my biography. It's the longest thing I've ever written, but you'd be great, So long story shorter. I wrote Ted's autobiography. I was just like
ghost writer. Put my name on the coverage, generously called me. Ted came out two thousand and eight. That got me in a different path, which really was good for me storytelling writing. I actually co wrote and directed a back to Detroit doc to me about the auto bail out called Look Another Day. I came out twenty sixteen, I want to say. And it also my late father founded a minorleague baseball team in Maine that I oversaw for
about fifteen years, Portland Sea Dogs Redstox Doba affiliate. As we were contemplating that, I did an academic fellowship with my wife called the Advanced Leadership in this Ship at Harvard University. It was an amazing program, and in that I started something called the Optimism Institute. I had this feeling that the world is getting more pessimistic than it should be. That it's not good for our health and frankly not good for our society. I'm having a terrific time.
I host a podcast every week called Blue Sky Right, a few people working on the tough challenges made which make us pessimistic, but approaching them of the sense of optimism and solutions, and I'd been a great experience for me. I've loved that. I enjoy this whole podcast ecosystem through that,
I think that's how I found you, Mike. I still love movies, and I don't run a movie channel anymore, but I have fond memories and I'm just really pleased to have this chance to talk to you in your audience.
A lot of people do a little bit of a lot of things. It sounds like you do a lot of bit of a lot of things that'd be fair there you ask, it'd still be a little But yeah, I've been really lucky, and I do have a My podcast has a really wide range of.
People, and I love that. I love to learn, I love to read actually think, and I've seen that in my optimistic people. They're interesting thread that I didn't expect, but one is a sense of lifetime learning. And Kelly Corrigan, who's a great writer. She was on my show and she said, well, yeah, it's a fundamentally optimistic position to take, to believe there's always more to learn. It is applied
to movies. There's always another movie you haven't seen. It's always a great one you forgot about that you can see again. What a great way to go through life. So yeah, it's been a great experience for.
Me being a movie fan. I used to be a huge fan of AMC and that used to be the channel and I would watched my first buster, Keaton on AMC when there was a marathon. How does AMC relate to TCM and how do those early days come about for you? For TCM, it.
Was American Movie Classics. They were the incumbent, They owned the category. George Clooney's father was the host.
Yeah, they were big.
And what happened was Ted Turner bought the MGM. He bought all of MGM in the late eighties and then quickly realized he couldn't afford all of the MGMs. That sold off the working studio in a deal where everyone thought he was nuts because they didn't see the value. He kept the movie Library and that was not just MGM, but also pre nineteen forty eight Warner Brothers, so Casablanca's in there, and then I think it wasn't part of
the same jaie. He also owned the RKO Library, so King Kong, Citizen Kane, and that was used to launch people forget That's TNT started as basically a kind of classic movie channel and some sports, and then it kept evolving to get more modern, more sports, had Sunday Night NFL briefly which we will forget NBA, And so these movies were collecting dust. Ted was also famously colorizing many
of them, which is so polarized. We could talk about that, but a virtue of that was the first step in colorization is a pristine restoration of the black and white print. And so we had these classic movies that were collecting dust. And Ted was never a seller. He could have AMC would have paid a lot of money to run Gone with the Wind, but Ted didn't like that idea. And so the idea was like, what could we do with this stuff? And Brad Siegel came down to Atlanta. He
actually had worked in programming at AMC. He understood that business, understood how valuable it was and we said, you know what, there's room for two of these channels, and most people don't know that AMC can't run Gone with the Wind or Citizen Kane or actually we had a license deal. They did get some RKO films, and so we decided to go right after them, not necessarily to knock them off the block, but to coexist. And so that's how it came about. And I was just so many stories
we didn't know what to call it. One of our points of differentiation was going to be we had a line it doesn't have to be old to be classic, the we, for example, had because of MGM, we owned, Rocky we owned I can't remember some of the examples we used, but that's a good one. And so that was gonna be a point of differentiation. TNT had a franchise called Our Favorite Movies. At one point we thought
about calling it our Favorite Movies. We actually had about five names we were going to put in a focus groups, one of them being Turner Classic Movies. And I was in charge of this, like twenty thousand dollars focus group in Ohio or something, and Ted got wind of the fact that we were spending money on a focus group and back when you still used to get typed memos. I wasn't even on the memo. You send it to
my boss and my boss's boss. It's that Turner Classic Movies is the name of the new channel, and that was it. That was the entire memo. I called my boss, so I guess for calling off the fuckers scroops. So that's how we got the name. And then funny fast forward to the day of the launch. He's walking up to the podium in Times Square and he whispers in the ear of our pr person, is it Turner Movie Classics or Turner Classic Movies and he's in Turner Classic.
We thanks, and he got it right in the announcement, so we pitched. Cable operators would say, why do we need this? And we tried to explain, not only do we now have the same movies, been way more movies. So AMC was repeating movies like crazy. They'd show them at eight o'clock, eleven o'clock, two o'clock, same movie. The old expression was they ran the sprockets off those movies. We are thing was we're going to show up to
four hundred movies a month, different movies. You could do that because those older movies are shorter, but we had such a huge library, so the pitch was these could live side by side. And then eventually what happened was when we were head to head with them, we became the more popular channel. AMC saw the writing on the wall and that's when they morphed into something different. So I'd argue that too. It's one of those sometimes capitalism works in a good way. They're the best for everybody.
TCM had this huge library and this incredible service, and AMC morphed into something else that was very valuable and everything went along well. So another long.
Answer to a simple question, that's how it came about. Did you guys ever have any sort of problems with censorship, because that was one of the things I do remember from AMC was watching straight time the Dustin Hoffmann film and there being a lot of like forced zooms in order to avoid showing like MM at Walsh's butt.
Yeah, that's a good question now, because that was the other thing. We said, we're going to be uncut, and we made a deal with Ted we are not going to show colorized movies. But no, and because we were not over the year and we weren't usually in basic cable packages an AMC and theory. So a lot of people aren't understand this subtle difference. But cable channels are not governed by the FCC only if you have a
public license over the airwaves. When people say, for example, I heard recently something said Fox News, the FCC should crack down on them. They don't have jurisdiction. It's a cable channel, so we could do whatever we want. I know, we didn't censor. And one interesting thing that's been done since I left that I give TCM a lot of credit for. As you go back to these old movies, there are a lot of racially insensitive material. Stuff you look at now, Oh my god, it's in the old cartoons.
And so rather they made a tough decision, but they said, rather than park these movies, we're going to run them with discussion. And they even did they do what I saw recently, the beautiful set up to Gone with the Win. You watch Gone with a Win today, it's, oh my god, it almost it doesn't quite glamorize slavery, but it comes pretty close. And so it was very thoughtful. Here are some of the objections people have to this film. Here's what the time was like, here's why we still think
it's a classic. Here why we think it's worth watching and discussing. The handle it beautifully and I believe in that. I think rather than pretend these things didn't happen, show them, put them in context. So no, we were very keen on nowha interruptions. Another thing people did on television, we did it on TVs that people didn't realize. To make a movie fit a two hour time slot, there was a thing called rotoscoping. I think it's called rotoscope. You could speed it up and slow it down, so you
do it in Westerns. If there's a panorama that took forever, you'd crank it up so it only took out ten seconds instead of thirty. We literally would do that to fit a timeslot. We didn't do any of that on TCM. We kept saying we're gonna we didn't. We use letterboxing and if people don't understand that, but especially before flight HCTVS, you have a square of TV. But these films were shot in a more horizontal sort of landscape mode and you have to put these boxes. And we have people
calling and say, what have you done? That you wrote, you broke my TV. No, we're trying to show you the full sea. There were these old movies bing Ron where you couldn't see the two characters talking to each other because they were cut off. So we were really proud of that, and I think it's one of the
reasons it's so esteem now in Hollywood circles. And we could talk about what happened when they threatened to cut the staff and the types of people who came out in defense, and turning Classic Movies knocked me out of my chair is pretty cool.
The other thing that TCM has and AMC had this I can't remember. Wasn't Robert Osbourne on there?
It was on turn Classic Movies. He was like right, so like Cloney was George Clooney's dad.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember his name as well. But it was to have those guides and to have those little intros, sometimes up to fifteen minutes or even more. And then you have specialized shows where it's those folks are talking and going back and forth, and to hear
those discussions it's always wonderful. But to get those little intros and to get that historical perspective, like you're talking about, like the kind of the warnings in front of things, but to get that little bit of historical perspective, to get a little bit of trivia or whatever it is. Yeah, those just make the movie sometimes.
Yes, by the way, it is Nick Colooney. I couldn't remember his name as the dead handsome guy, just I guess Son and Brat. I get Brad Siegel credit for that because he understood the AMC model, and right away he said, we got to get Robert Osborne. He was one of our very first hires. Not only did he know the movies, he knew the movie stars. He was one of these guys who he stayed at Betty Davis's vacation house. He was a Paul Barrett somebody famous's funeral
I can't remember which one. And having to be a lovely human being. He literally wrote the book on the history of the Oscars, just all that stuff. Other early hires we made were researchers who really understood the library. And there's this, you're one of them. There's people out there who know these movies inside out in spreadable passion. Yeah, and so you take and we had, frankly, you run that many movies really obscure movies and some that were
old but not really classic. Think we're very good. They made bad movies back then too, but with an introduction the other thing we did, and frankly it was hardly to save money, but it was also really cool. When Ted bought the library, he got all kinds of assets, including the trailers, so we would instead of spending money on a team of people to cut original promos, we came up to these cool little framing divide literally frames
around them, and we ran the trailers. Had some of these original trailers are hysterical on you you look at the old techniques they use.
But it brought a lot to the service.
Again largely just at first it was like this would be an efficient way to do it, and it's like, this is way more fun than if we did tonight it all on tournal closet movies. We we actually did some of that stuff, but the trailers are gold so that was fun too. But yeah, the studio intro, so one of our biggest expenditures we were very lead was spending
money on the set that Robert was in. It really set a tone for the show for the network, and yeah, we're really proud of all that, but there's a lot of thought went into it.
And then for you, obviously you've been in the media world for your entire life, but this must have been an educational thing for you. Even just seeing a lot of these movies.
Moins, I had some sense, but I really dove in. And also it was wild to see the community that was out there. So when we first launched, we barely had any cable subscribers. It was a tough time. People are so used to streaming now, it's a totally different world than nineteen ninety four. When we launched, it was like getting on a grocery store shelf. There was only so much space, and if you wanted to get on the great nuts, we're going to have to come off
for you to find a slot. At the beginning, we had very few subscribers, but if you had a satellite dish, you could pull down the signal. So a lot of our sands were that, and out of the blue, we started getting letters some Genie Jean Schalette had a home in western Massachusetts. I think at that point he was actually doing these Today Show segments for the young people out there. He was very well known movie critic on the Today Show and a celebrity Mike running down the
little hallway. Gee, Charlo just wrote us a letter and he was amazing. He really levedy to do. We ought to show that movie because she was in that too. Really thoughtful, and then we realized there were this community out there. It was really cool and that was one of the ways we got distribution because we kept saying, hey,
call your cable operator if you're missing this, call cable. Ever, we're showing movies you're not seeing on a MC cannabis ground swell that grew into a fan base eight years later, rushed to the network's defense whenever it's dropped from a system, or are they reading the paper that they're doing a downsize. I think this is incredible, and everything from hardcore old movie fans to celebrities to Ryan Reynolds came out of
the woodwork and defended TCM from cutbacks. And Martin Scorsesey was an early fan because he's a huge film preservationist and he was an early advocate. Steven Spielberg. It was just amazing the range of people, and I think another service we provided was that curation, not just the introduction of films, but the programming the film noir showcase or a Star of the month, because frankly, even if you are a classic movie fan, even today with streaming, it's intimidating.
Where am I going to find these? Which one should I watch? Wind up watching the same one over and over again, versus we would serve this up and here's a movie. Humphrey Boger was in the probably I haven't seen, so the discovery and a curation and so people can just say, let's turn on TCM and see what's on tonight, as opposed to us spend a half hour in the Blockbuster store on Netflix trying to find this movie. Yeah.
I was really proud of what it became. I was there from the time it was approved, probably early ninety three. We went on the air in April ninety four, and I was done by the fall of ninety five moving over to TVs, So a lot of what I'm talking about was done by my successors but hadn't been there at the beginning. Just really proud of what it became. It's a really amazing thing to watch.
So tell me more about the OPPOSM project and I know more about this and how that even came to you.
Yeah, thank you. So I've always been, by nature a more optimistic person. That was funny. I remember being a brooding teenager like everybody else. And then out of the blue, my sister found my high school senior yearbook and my mom's basement. I didn't have a copy. It's your senior, I think, so go right to the back, and I'm looking at the class elections most likely to this best whatever, And they had a vote for class optimists, and it was me in another even forty years ago, with a
stupid thumbs up. I guess I've always been this way, and I have been genuinely concerned. My kids are now twenty eight and thirty, and they have friends who think the world's going to end in thirty years because of climate change, and frustrated by political division, and all understandable, but I think all also a little bit extreme. And
also I'm a history buff. I think also abs a good understanding of history and the things we've been through before four and how the world innecturably keeps getting better, and that when someone says this country's never been more divided than we are today, I quickly turned to the
Civil War and those of us. I don't remember the summer of sixty eight because I was two years old, But if you study history and realize how divided this country was through Vietnam, through the assassinations of Bobby and MLK, Bobby Kennedy and MLK, come on, We've been through a heck of a lot in our history. And my concern is if you go all the way to pessimism, that leads to apathy, which leads to an action which could halt the sense of progress and the actual progress we've
always made. So that's how it came about. I love storytelling, as you could probably tell already, and I love the idea of interviewing people. So I learned a lot of interview techniques from writing the Ted Turmer book because I did a ton of banterviewing not just Ted for that, and then making the Auto Bailout documentary because that was one hundred percent interviews. Began a narrator, So I love that. I love to learn a lot of my guests are authors.
I love to read their books and it's been great, and I get anecdotes from people. You know what this is really helping? Wow, I hadn't looked at it that way. I was asked to do a high school graduation speech, which was who you know, small little high school up in me, and I was able to distill my feelings on this and one of the things I told then picture eighteen year olds just wanting me to get off the stage. And I said, look, I know what you're thinking.
Your generation lefters are a mess. First of all, welcome to the club. Every generation inherits a mess from their parents. And I said, my definition of optimism is you get out and do something. You have a role in making tomorrow better, So not just going to happen. And when I was in high school, I'll date myself. I graduated nineteen eighty four, which first of all, wasn't as bad as the hopelessly pessimistic George Orwell said it was going to be. But we had a part time.
We had Cold War.
That's the worst we had aids. We didn't have a name for it when I graduated, but it was killing people. I grew up in Greater New York. It was killing people by the scores of terrifying. We were boycotting each other the Olympics because of the Cold War. We didn't go to Moscow. They didn't the russianston the Soviet Union didn't come to La And yeah, we whipped on climate change. But when I was graduate in high school had acid rain and the ozone layer. If you go through the list,
I just listened. We basically kicked them all off. And how did that happen? It didn't just happen. We got them voted. We protested. When I got to college, the campus protests were divestments from South Africa. We banned four or Flora carbons. My mom used to spray her hair with this stuff that was killing the ozone layer. We listened to the scientist and we fixed it, you know. So my advice to this young group was like, you
guys are next in line to take off. Go sit there and do them gloom, get out and fix this stuff we've left for you, just like my parents' generation left stuff for me. So that's my message. The podcast is called Blue Sky, available wherever you get your podcast, and it comes out every week and I just released my seventy second episode, so it's rolling. And I was featured last March on the Today Show with Hoda and Jenna. Because March, many of you probably are on your calendar,
but March is National Optimism Month. It's actually a thing. I looked it up and so I had good number before that, and that really helped me take off. And I've got a good loyal following and hope to keep growing it and I just I feel really strongly about it.
I'm working on a book on the subject, paradox of Modern Optimism OMO for the youngsters, And the paradox I see it is that you can argue that there's never been a better time to be live than today, but there's also never been a harder time to be optimistic. How do we square those things? And the second part for me, a lot of its social media and media we get in our ecod chambers and we pull each
other down. Wherever you are on political strata, you go deeper that way when you spend all day wallowing in social media that agrees with you and outrages you. So that's what I'm doing and I'm having a great time, and yeah, I hope some of your listeners might enjoy it as well, in addition to your podcast.
Of course, I'm sure there are times where you still get discouraged, still get down in the dumps. How do you pick yourself up from that, you maintain that optimism or get back.
And glad you said that, because that is absolutely true. And out of objections you get for people's oh, come on, you can't always be happy. I said, this isn't happiness optimism. This is thinking that tomorrow could be better than today and that you have a role in making it. So that's key part. But yeah, so when I get down, you have to get through the tough stuffs that the
best way is not around, it's through. And I think also if you can look back on some of the worst setbacks that you're like, first of all, look back on how many things you worried about that never happened at the key so you spend a lot of our time making up worst case scenarios in the future that don't happen, or when you're in the very worst or you've been through the very worst, when you look back on it, think about the silver linings, the consolation prizes
that came out of that. So I'd gotten better about talking about I lost a dear niece to cancer. She was twenty nine years old. It was brutal, and the sister's oldest daughter awful. I wish you were still here. I wish it had never happened, obviously. However, the silver linings are an empathy that you get from that a club that you're in. You wish you weren't a member, but you're in that cancer club. When something similar happens to a friend or a loved one or a child
of a friend, you have a totally different response. You understand it, You understand people's griefs, what to say, what not to say, in a way you wish hadn't happened. It makes you a better person on the other side. So the toughest times to get through it do have silver linings. Usually on the other side, you also have to understand. I'm sure that people have seen this today who are rolling their eyes at me and going through something absolutely terrible, and they get that. And I've been
an incredibly privileged person in so many ways. But I think it does help you get through if you can try to keep looking for housing. That's gonna what I'm gonna learn from this. How am I going to be better on the other side of this. I think that's really important. And then again, just knowing that these things are going to happen sometimes I think I actually have an issue with a lot of the happiness literature. I think a lot of it, in my view, creates a
false expectation, and especially with young people. And I think that the combination of preaching happiness to young people and social media. You hear about all these kids they get to college and they have a bad day and I have a bad week, and then they go on social media and all their friends are having a great day and a great week. And of course, as the old expression goes, you're comparing your insights to their outsides, first of all, and it's not helpful. You are going to
be unhappy. Awful things are going to happen to you. Sorry, but that's the truth. It's how you deal with and how you can stay optimistic. So that's how I try to do. With my wife were here, she'd say, listen, this guy's not always walk in the park. I have my moments like everybody else. But I think having that default setting towards the hopeful and positive is a good thing to have.
Yeah, I completely agree, mister Burke. Thank you so much for your time. I'd love to have you back on sometime. I hear You've got a great take on the Twelve Angry Men, which we haven't covered yet.
Oh, if you listened to that episodes, I was a guest on a fabulous podcast, and yeah, I'd come on anytime, only if you call me Bill and not mister Burke. But yes. One of the great pleasures of movies is rewatching something you'd forgotten about. And I was on a show that encouraged me to think about that movie and rewatch it. By the way, I recently just rewatched Moonstruck with my daughter. Oh my god, just this side of perfect that movie. There's so many movies like that. Look
you gotta smile on your face. You think back to that movie. Nicholas cage Is performs, he has his hand, he has bride. Oh my god, what's better than sitting back a movie like that. I'm watching in a New York City with my daughter who lives in New York, and it's just it's a love letter to New York. Anyway, I will come on anytime you'd like, if you call me Bill, and I really appreciate it an honor to do on your show. I appreciate you reaching out.
You gotta Bill, thank you so much. This was wonderful take care of my.
Time.
Things in life I bade, they can't really mte you made.
I'm a things. Just might you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on laughs, Whistle back, rumble, give a whistle, and this will help things turn out for the beast.
I always look on the b side.
Lie, Always look on the lie.
Sigh the lie.
If LA seems johnny rotten, there's something you've forgotten. And that's the last one of the dancing.
When you're feeling in the dubs, dabby silly chumps, just purse your lips and whistle.
That's the thing.
I always look on the bright side of life.
Come on, always look up the right side of life before life is quite so.
And that's the final word. You must always face the curtain with a bear.
Forget about your seat, give the audience a gooin, enjoy it.
It's a la chart and.
So always look on the.
Bright side of them.
I just beliefore you draw your terminal breath. Love's a piece of sweet.
When you look at it, lives a laugh and that's a junk.
It's true.
You'll see it's all a show. Keep them laughing as you go. Just remember that the last laugh is on you.
And the players. Look on the right side.
Always look on the right side of love.
I'm a mark.
You act.
Right side.
Always look on the right side of life. Where as things happen to see.
You know, gona lose.
You know you come from laughing. You go back to nothing where you lost office. Nothing will come from napping. You know, a nice time cheer the old bugger.
I'll do said quiz.
It's needed in a record.
You'll be in a minute.
The bras s your girl bridge just run off with the Argentinian polo bat. Okay, your using just eat camping, a baby sitting and he's from the life, all right. So your team's losing fifteen mile home to Varney.
Alone, is it?
So come on, tier up, moan, moan, moan. That's what people do these days, especially your peoples. But we're going to do is sit around and moan as you take your teeth away and come on, girls, put a kit on. I have a nice cup of tea.
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Come on, you grew with this joggy. Better get your scrubby shopping. Oh, but you better come to so many pretty than news.