April 4, 2024 • 40 mins
You’ve probably been entertained by entrepreneur and filmmaker Andrew Jarecki even if you didn’t realize it. He co-founded the business everyone used in the 1990s: Moviefone. His list of accomplishments also include co-writing the theme song for the hit TV show, Felicity, directing the Ryan Gosling film, All Good Things, and directing and producing the documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, which won 18 international prizes and earned an Academy Award nomination. He’s probably best known for directing the Emmy-winning HBO series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, which will be back with Part Two this year. Andrew sat down with Bob to recount how he got Moviefone off the ground and changed the industry forever; the major pivots and innovations behind the production of his films; and share how his parents influenced his career. You’ll get a sense of the unique skills that have enabled him to turn curiosities into successes, and have fun along the way.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I didn't really think about it as a business at first,
and then eventually, when we put it up on a
bit of a lark, we started to see people calling,
and suddenly we were getting you have twenty seven calls
this hour, and then later I would call it and say,
you have one hundred and forty two thousand calls this hour.
Like that started happening, and we were amazed by it.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I am Bob Pittman, and welcome to Math and Magic.
Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on episodes Today, we're
going to hear some lessons and stories from a man
whose life has been about curiosity and the unique skills
to turn that curiosity in the businesses and projects and
have fun along the way. Entrepreneur filmmaker Andrew Dreki. Andrew
(00:53):
grew up in the New York City suburbs in the
sixties and seventies, wildly successful and very curious parents with
an incredible workout think a family of high achievers. He
started one of those businesses everyone used in the nineteen nineties, moviefone.
I was at AOL when we bought it, and although
I knew Andrew before then I got to know him
a lot better after that. He co wrote a theme
(01:14):
song for a hit TV show, directed a movie with
Ryan Gosling, made a documentary that won eighteen international prizes
and was nominated for an Academy Award. He produced a
movie Catfish, and the HBO series The Jinx, The Life
and Deaths of Robert Durst, which led to his arrest
and prosecution. He's a fascinating blend between street culture and
(01:36):
the Ivy League. He's really funny, equally as nice, and
he also plays drums. Andrew welcome, Thank you. So before
we jump into the meaty stuff, I want to do
you in sixty seconds. You ready perfect? Do you prefer
cats or dogs?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Dogs?
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Early Riser or night Owl? Night Ol New York or
Los Angeles, New York? Cocher PEPSI Iced Team, Beach, your mountains,
beach or stones.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Everything is the Beatles, books or movies, movies, cook or
Eat out, Eat out comedy or drama comedy.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
It's about to get harder. First job, I was a magician,
all time favorite musical artist, Stevie Wonder, favorite TV show,
The Bear, Smartest person you know.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
My dad childhood hero, Willy Wonka.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Favorite movie Willy Wonka on the chocolate Factory technology. You
can't live without it.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I have a snowcone machine.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
I cannot live without that most important bit of advice
you ever got from my dad.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Don't just do something? Stand there, Favorite city, Rome, secret talent.
I was Duncan Yo Yo champion in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Have you lost a skill? Kind of Okay? Final one?
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
I think I wanted to be a filmmaker.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Let's start with moviefone. It was pre and early internet.
It was a way to get movie listings for people
who are young and don't understand moviefone. Everybody used it.
That's where you got the info about what movie was out.
You could buy your tickets there, and those were in
the days when you talked into a phone to get
stuff done as opposed to going on the internet. And
(03:15):
everyone really knew the voice of mister movie Phone. Give
us the origin story.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I was trying to go to the movies around nineteen
eighty eight, and I was calling my local theater, which
you used to have to do because the New York
Times didn't have all the show times in it. The
theater phone lines were always busy because the theaters didn't
understand that there were two thousand people trying to call
in a twenty minute period for that night. And I
got through at eight fifteen and the machine told me
(03:42):
that the movie had started at eight o'clock. And I thought,
why did I just ruin my night? And this multi
billion dollar movie industry doesn't get that I'm not able
to go out and buy my seven dollars then movie ticket.
So I thought, you know, voicemail was pretty advanced then,
and I thought, well, don't we create a service that
lets you push buttons. Maybe it's a free local service
(04:02):
and you put in the first three letters of the
movie title, put in your zip code, and it would
spit out just the theater closest to you, just the
information that you needed. I thought that would be a
cool thing for me to use. I didn't really think
about it as a business at first, and then eventually,
when we put it up on a bit of a lark,
we started to see people calling and suddenly we were
(04:22):
getting you have twenty seven calls this hour, and then
later I would call it and say, you have one
hundred and forty two thousand calls this hour like that
started happening, and we were amazed by it.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
And so that's the idea. You get it started. How
did you know how to turn that into a business.
Remember we were on the buying end of it. You
sold it for a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
It's true. And you know, I was very lucky because
my dad is a very smart business person. And you know,
he started out as a psychiatrist. He was a professor
of psychiatry at Yale, but he always had a business bug.
He was so smart about business. So I think I
immediately thought, well, this thing that we just put together
seems to be working for consumers. I wonder how much
(05:06):
I can promote it. I wonder how I can promote it.
I talked to my dad about it. I talked to
other smart people that I knew. It was pretty clear
that all of our customers were walking through the doors
of about five thousand cinemas in America. So if I
could get the number seven seven seven film in front
of people, up on the screens and trailers before the movie,
I also figured out everybody's motivations quickly. I went to
(05:29):
a bunch of conventions, Show East and Show West. I
didn't know anybody, and I just walked around talked to everybody.
This is the movie business in the movie business, and
I realized that nobody was talking to each other. They
didn't understand that moviegoers were having trouble going to the movies.
It was just a pain in the neck to do it.
And the studios didn't really control the theaters. The theaters
didn't control the studios, and I thought, well, there's a
(05:52):
window in here where I could make things easier for
the consumer and also make something that would be very
useful for the endo. So we just started to figure
out where are the little pinch points and leverage points. So,
for example, I knew that the theater owners had control
over their movie screens. At the time, nobody was doing
advertising on movie screens. So I said to the theater owners,
(06:14):
if I give you a thirty second ad for moviefone
and it's entertaining, will you put it up on their screens.
Knowing that they had a problem, which was that the
newspapers were charging them a fortune to put their movie
listings in the newspapers. The studios weren't helping them, so
they said well, if this guy's coming along, it is
going to do it for free. I'll give him thirty
seconds of free time before the movie. So that was
(06:36):
an example of some marketing thinking that helped us tremendously,
and it was a very you know, what do they say,
all marketing is local, you know, getting out into the
movie theaters, handing out little cards to people, getting that
message up on the screen. It sort of flowed naturally.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
And where did mister moviefone come from?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
The voice very interesting? The voice was very important and
if you call right now, you can't really hear it anywhere,
but if you call my wife's cell phone, you'll hear
hello and welcome to a Nancy phone. It became really
important to the brand. And it was lucky because when
I started the company in eighty eight eighty nine, I
found that there were a couple guys in Los Angeles
(07:16):
who were doing the exact same thing that we were.
We saw a little blurb about them in the Hollywood Reporter.
We called him up on the phone and I said, well,
I'd like to speak to the president please, and the
guy said speaking and I thought, well that's good. This
is a tiny little company, And so we decided to
join forces. And he was the voice. And he was
(07:37):
a guy from Idaho with a mustard colored suit and
big shoulder pads, and he had a big hairstyle. And
he was nothing like me. You know, I'd gone to
school on the East Coast and grown up in a
totally different way. But we had been working on the
same idea quietly for a long time. And I learned
by the way later from him that not only was
he the voice of movie phone and of very recognizable voice,
(08:01):
but that his mother in Idaho was the time lady.
She was the person you would call and she would
say at the tone, the time will be eleven forty
five exactly, boob. I thought that was kind of incredibic.
It's genetic.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
So why did you decide to sell the business?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
I had been doing it for around I think eleven years,
and then I ran into you. I went to the
premiere of You've Got Mail, which is a movie that
featured AO well, and it also had a little movie
phone blurb in it. It was Tom Hanks and Meg
Ryan are walking around and you hear the hello and
welcome movie phone, and I was sitting right in front
of you and the whole AOL team was there. And
(08:46):
I got up and you said to me, how you doing?
And I said good. He said, what's going on with
your business? And I had just been in these conversations
and I didn't know where the conversations were going. I
had a friend who was a banker, and my friend
said to me, what's going on? And I said, well,
I'm talking to Barry Dealer about this thing, and I'm
talking to this other guy about this thing. And he said, oh,
you're selling your company. And I said no, no, you
don't understand. I'm going to do a strategic alliance with somebody.
(09:09):
And he said, Andrew, I've been doing this a long time.
You're selling your company. And then you said, well, you know,
but come visit me. And then I had a phone
call with you and you said, listen, I'd love to
see you, but if you're going to come, just to
let you know, like big companies don't do strategic alliances
with little, tiny companies, like we just buy those companies.
So if that's on the radar for you, if that's
(09:30):
something that's possible, then we should get together. And I thought,
maybe that's right, Maybe that is how this is going
to end up playing out, so we started moving forward.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
This was your first big win, probably financially and probably
image wise and accomplishment. How did it change your own
self image?
Speaker 2 (09:50):
You know, it's a boost because you feel like this
thing that you've been laboring over in the shadows has
been noticed. It was clear to me also that it
was going to be fun process, that I was going
to learn something. I was going to learn something from you,
I was going to learn something from the people on
the deal. It was a new chapter to think about
taking this thing and bringing it into another company.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
You and I became pretty good pals after the AOL days,
and you always had a good story about something, And
I remember you said, you know, I'm thinking about how
I'm going to make a documentary about the clowns for
kids parties. Then the next time I saw you and
ask you how that film was coming along, you said, well,
it taken a strange and unexpected turn. Can you tell
(10:33):
us the story of capturing the Freedman's which, by the way,
was nominated for an Academy Award in One Sun Dance
and a bunch of other awards.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It was a very strange ride and a wonderful ride
in a lot of ways, because, as I said, I
was a magician when I was twelve years old, I
could charge thirty five dollars and I could go to
people's houses and entertain their children at the birthday party.
I had moved on and stopped doing that when I
was twelve, Yet these people were always in my mind
because they were interesting characters. You know, they call each
(11:03):
other by their clown names and real life, and Silly
Billy is best friends with Princess Priscilla, and when they
have issues in their relationship, they go to Professor Putter.
And I thought, this is a crazy, amazing community. I
bet there's a lot of humanity there. I bet if
I go talk to these people, I'll find an interesting story.
So I reached out to many of them and ultimately
(11:25):
settled on this guy, Silly Billy, who was the number
one guy in New York.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
And I remember Silly Billy from my kids.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, And if you were if it was a fancy
Park Avenue family, if you didn't hire Silly Billy, you
were not keeping up with the rest of the people
on Park Avenue. And I remember I kind of held
off on talking to him because I knew that he
had a big ego, and I thought if I called
him right off the bat, he would torture me. So
I waited until I talked to everybody else, all of
his competitors, and finally I called him and I said,
(11:54):
you know, I'm thinking I'm making this film and he said, well,
it's not much of a film without me in it.
And I said, okay, well fair enough. You know, do
you want to participate? Well, yeah, okay, come on over.
So I started to interview him, and ultimately I discovered
that he had a secret story and that his sort
of clown persona was something that he had been living
(12:16):
under for all these years. And I never thought there
was anything sinister about him, but I learned very quickly
that his family had been the target of a massive
criminal case where they had been accused of what at
the time was called a mass sex abuse case, that
they'd been accused of molesting hundreds of children. And I thought, well,
(12:36):
this is an incredibly deep and complicated situation where you
have somebody who's New York's number one children's entertainer and
his family is one of the most notorious families in
the history of New York. And then as I got
deeper into it, I found out there was a lot
more to the story, and in fact, it wasn't what
I thought when I first looked into it. And I
went back to him and I said, you've sort of
(12:57):
hinted things to me, just to let you know I
did figure it out. And eventually he said to me, well,
if that's what you're making a movie about, I don't
know how I feel about that, but I probably should
tell you that when my family was the subject of
this big criminal investigation and the police came and knocked
down the door of our house in Great Neck Long Island,
(13:18):
I had just bought a video camera and I started
recording the family falling apart, and that was one of
the most unique pieces of video, or about twenty two
hours of the most intimate, most upsetting, internal family discussions,
and they really traced what was happening to the family,
and that became a really important part of the film.
(13:39):
So the film shifted tremendously from what I originally thought
to what it became.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
You ever feel guilty about having that insider access, I mean,
what kind of emotions come up because suddenly you're right
in the middle of it.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah, I mean, I found myself in that situation a lot.
I think that I come to it with an open heart.
I try to be fair to people. In that case,
it was up to silly Billy. It was up to
David Friedman to decide whether to let me use that material.
There was a multi month period when he had shown
me the material. I knew how powerful it was, and
(14:16):
he had not yet decided whether he was going to
give it to me or not.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
What lesson did you learn about product creation with this film?
I mean, we all talk in business about pivots. That's
a hell of a pivot.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I think the most important thing for me is always
just to try to follow my intuition. There were many
times when I noticed little things about the story and
they made me curious, and I tried to stay open,
and I tried to be a good listener, because people
really do want to tell you their story. I remember
Al Masles, the great documentary filmmaker, said to me when
(14:52):
I was in the middle of capturing the Friedman's and
I was worried that I was going to expose this
family in a way, and they had had already been
very traumatized. You know, whatever you thought about them. They
had really been very damaged by it, and he said,
nobody wants to die without telling their story. You're doing
them a favor, and you're going to do it with
fairness and with love.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Catfish the movie, it's also a TV show? How about
that one? Give us the origin there and here you
are dealing with the unexpected again.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
This is a very strange way that you and I
crossed paths again, because that would never have happened if
it weren't for you, guys. I was in Los Angeles
working on a film and Nancy said to me, you know,
the Pittmans are calling and they sent you this thing
and there's this DVD. And I remember thinking, oh, right,
I got that DVD. I promised that I would watch it,
(15:47):
so I just started watching it at about midnight, and
I couldn't take my eyes off this footage. And it
wasn't yet a film, but it was the beginnings of something.
And it was a story about a guy, Neim Shulman,
who was a friend of yours and his brother and
their friend, and how this eight year old girl had
sent Neiva Facebook message saying Hey, I'm only eight, but
(16:09):
I'm a painter. I saw one of your photographs, and
I'd like to do a painting of it, would you mind?
You've said, okay, you can do it, and she did
this painting, and a few months later she sends him
the painting and it's quite good, perhaps curiously strangely good
for an eight year old, And they get into a
conversation with her mother, and the filmmakers start filming it,
(16:29):
and they meet not just her mother, but also her
sister who's nineteen, and a whole constellation of other people
in this little girl's life, and at some point it
becomes clear that maybe the story is not as innocent
as we thought, and then the boys go on a
road trip out to Ishpeming, Michigan, to discover what's really
(16:50):
going on and what's really behind this eight year old painter.
The story was so gripping when I was watching it,
and it wasn't even together yet, and I remember thinking
I can help, and we can help bring this thing
to the screen in a more substantial way, and we
agreed to work together on it. And then it was
a sun dance, and then it was a big hit,
and then it turned into this television show. But it's
(17:10):
another one of those stories that you think is going
one way and then goes a very different way.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Okay, I'm gonna do one last one and then we'll
get to some other topics. Robert Durst talk about a
strange twist and turn. I remember you made the scriptive
movie about him, and now I probably murdered his wife.
And then he calls you and things pivot, big Pivot,
(17:36):
tell us about it.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So I had been interested in the story of Bob Durst,
who had been suspected of killing three people but never
convicted and in fact, never really even tried for anything
other than one of them, and he had been acquitted.
And I thought that what was perhaps most interesting about
it was that he had this beautiful wife, and in
nineteen eighty two she disappeared and nobody knew what happened,
(18:00):
and tour and a lot of people suspected him of
killing her. So I started writing a screenplay about that
story and reached out to Bob Durst through his lawyer,
and his lawyer said, oh, Bob's a very private guy,
and you know he wishes you well, but he doesn't
want to participate or help you with your script. And
I said okay, and then we finished the film, and
(18:21):
there had been a little speculation while we were making
the film that while I was with Ryan Gosling and
Kirsten Dunst in Westchester shooting at a train station and
so on the scripted film, that somebody had been kind
of spying on us, that somebody was off in the
bushes or somebody was in a car nearby, and I thought, well,
that's crazy. Ultimately I learned that that was true. And
(18:43):
so the guy who had been so curious about it
was Bob Durst. How old was he at this time,
He was in his late sixties, and so he had
reached out through the distributor of the film, Magnolia Pictures.
Just one day he Amon Bowles, the guy who is
the head of the company, and we used to do
(19:03):
this thing where I would use Bob's voice because he
has a very recognizable voice. So we would just joke
around like that, and I would when I was hanging
up on the fastiar of the voice, I would say
if I was finishing the call, I would say bye bye,
which is how Bob says goodbye, and other things like that.
And so one day Amon gets a phone call and
(19:24):
the assistant comes in and in air quote says, you know,
it's Bob Durst on the phone. And he picks up
the phone, assuming it's me, and he says, oh, Bob,
I'm glad you're calling. And the guy on the phone says,
who am I talking to? And Amon says, oh, this
is Amon Bolts. Who is this? This is Robert Durst.
So Amon was very very nervous about this, and he
(19:45):
called me and he said, listen, Bob Durst wants to
get in touch with you. And he put us in touch.
And because I had Bob's cell phone number, because he
had made the first call, I was able to record
the first call I ever made to him. He and
I started talking and he said, well, you know, I
want to see the movie. I've heard good things about
the movie. I said, great, I want to show it
to you. I went out to LA I showed it
(20:06):
to him in a screening room. He called me right
after he saw it and he said, I want you
to know I like the movie very much, and let's
talk about doing something together. We started talking about maybe
doing an interview, and finally I did sit down with
him for three days in California and interviewed him about
all these subjects. That you know, camera rolling when you
oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We had three cameras because
(20:27):
I knew it was so unusual that somebody was in
his position and would be willing to talk about and
be asked questions about these three murders. And his position
was I didn't do any of these murders, but I thought, well,
he probably did, and I'm fascinated to see how he's
going to describe these things to me. So we did
these three days of interviews, and then it became clear
(20:48):
to me that it was going to require a reinvestigation
of the case, that I might be able to find
things that the police hadn't found. And then in fact
we did, and we discovered a piece of evidence that
tied him to the mur.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Like true crime podcasts before their time, Yeah, yeah, solve
the murder. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
It was a very unusual situation, and it was really
the first among the very first times that HBO or
a broadcaster like that had decided it was okay to
do a six part documentary series. Because it was so
much gripping material in it, there was no way to
do it. It's just a film, So it ended up
being this sort of behemoth and then what's unique about
(21:26):
it is that in the last episode he confesses, and
he confesses in a very unusual way, accidentally on a
hot mic in the bathroom, because I think he was
so burdened by this information, and I think he did,
in his own way, feel guilty and feel that he
had killed the person that probably loved him most in
the world, his wife. And so when I finished the
(21:48):
conversation and I show him the evidence, he goes in
the bathroom seconds later and he says, there it is,
You're caught. And then a few minutes later he's rambling,
because he does talk to himself. He's rambling in the
bathroom and he says, killed them all, of course, and
that became headline news. It was literally in the front
page of New York Times, I think three times in
(22:09):
a row this story. And he was arrested the day
before the final episode aired on HBO. That's never happened.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
And he was preparing to leave the country, correct, and
he was getting ready to go to Cuba. You went
through a long period with Durst in your life, eighteen years.
How did your family react sharing you with that obsession.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Well, I remember the last episode was sort of in
the offing, and Bob knew for a period of time
that the show was going to be very bad for him.
In the beginning, I think he thought, well, this will
be fun. It'll be the me show. I can say
whatever I want and they'll just film it and it'll
go on television. So for him, I think there was
(22:51):
a you know, there was just a narcissistic thrill to it.
But as it was clear to him that I had
found this evidence, and as I showed him the evidence,
he started to get more and more anxious about it.
And then my family started to get more anxious about him,
knowing that because he hadn't been arrested, and at one
point the FBI was trailing him, and I had an
FBI agent that I was talking to all the time,
(23:11):
and then one day he called me up he said, yeah,
we lost him, and so that morning I think I
got a security detail. And I remember meeting with my
daughter the night before. We were having dinner and I
said she was little at the time, and I said
to her, just so you know, tomorrow we're going to
have some other people with us when we go take
you to school, and she immediately started crying. So she
(23:31):
knew that it was an unusual time.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
More of math and magic right after this quick break.
Welcome back to math and Magic. Let's hear more from
my conversation with Andrew Dureki. Let's go back in time.
I want to explore your origins. You were a kid
of the sixties, seventies, and I guess early eighties. Tell
(23:54):
me about your family and describe how that moment in
time that fan shaped you.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
We went from when I was little living in New Haven,
when my dad was at Yale and my mom was
She was a writer and eventually became a writer of
Time magazine. And the two of them were very important
influences because my dad was very scientific and methodical and
became even more so in a way when he went
(24:23):
into business, because he's very numerous and so to some extent,
my dad was the math and my mom was the magic.
And I think that I always listened to both of them,
and I always had both of those voices in my ear.
And then we moved to New York because my dad
was starting a business. It was going to grow to
be a big business. My mom was a big influence.
(24:45):
And I think my mom, because she had actually had
been a film critic at Time magazine. My mom thought
about films, and she showed me films and we talked
about artistic things. My dad does not read fiction, doesn't
get it, doesn't understand why people read fiction. But those
two pieces I think were very important in giving me
permission to be interested in both to be okay with
(25:07):
math and to understand the benefit of business, but also
to listen to my artistics side.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
What did you learn in childhood that you still use today?
Speaker 2 (25:17):
I mean, one thing is that you know my dad
was tough and not always predictable, and he was in
that those early years, very mercurial. You never quite knew
what you were going to get out of him. My
dad was a genius. When he was in Germany as
a child, they used to test out the IQ tests
on him and he scored a two hundred and six,
(25:39):
and so I was. When I was a kid. We
would sit at the dinner table with him and say, okay, Dad,
fifteen six hundred and forty seven divided by one hundred
and forty two nine hundred and thirty, and he would
get like a dope look on his face and he
would say five boy and six nine seven three, And
I thought, Okay, well that's what I got here. I
got a brilliant guy who's not always going to be predictable.
(26:02):
I got good at dealing with complicated personalities. And Bob
Durst is an example of one. Billy Billy is an
example of one. It's something that kind of became a
little bit of a superpower.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
You went to Princeton. When you were there, you directed theater, right,
you were clearly going on a path. Why did you
veer off in the business after college? Whant I continue
that with creative bent?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
When I was in college, I had been doing a
lot of theater stuff. I had been reading a lot
of theater. I pursued it intellectually, but also directed plays
and produced plays. And interestingly, my senior thesis production, which
was a production of a play called Ubu, not only
had I done this sort of whole artistic thing, but
(26:47):
I decided that I wanted to do a marketing campaign
for it that would be like for a movie. And
so I had everybody on campus wearing these little buttons
that said Ubu. Nobody knew what it was, and we
ended up having sold out run for the entire run.
And that never happens.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
So my dad saw that happening, and I had a
professor at Princeton who said, I want you to go
to Yale Drama School for directing, because that's going to
be your thing. And I said that to my dad,
and I think he decided he was going to lobby
against it. And we had dinner together and he said, listen,
we have this big business. It's an incredible learning experience.
(27:26):
I get that you want to do the artistic thing,
but I want you to come into business for a
year or two. Once you learned what a treasury bill is,
and once you understand something about how you talk to
a lawyer, then even if you decide to be an artist,
you're not going to get screwed like all the other artists,
you know. And it was a pretty compelling argument. He
(27:47):
was selling the biggest of his businesses at that time.
There was a guy that was running it who was brilliant,
and he said, come work for George and you don't
have to deal with me at all, but this guy's
going to take you to business school. I put the
artistic stuff on hold, really because my dad thought it
was a good idea, and I thought I would listen
to him. As it turned out, I think it really
was an enormously important choice because I was able to
(28:09):
go back to artistic work after that, but with a
completely different set of tools.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
At one point in your life, you just picked up
and moved to Rome for a while kids everything. What
was that about?
Speaker 2 (28:24):
You know, I had sold the business. Thanks to you,
I was able to go do something completely different. And
I remember thinking, you know, my kids go to private
school in Manhattan, and Nancy and I were thinking, like,
we got to get him out of here and just
get him into a place where they're going to have
a new language and a new frame of reference. And
so we moved to Rome originally for a year, and
(28:46):
you said to me, don't move for two years, And
I said why not? And you said, well, one year
is great, but two years people stop inviting.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
You to things.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
You're off the radar. And I remember thinking like, he
might be right, but let me see how I feel
after a year, And we ended up saying for two years.
But it changed a lot of things in my brain.
I forced myself to really learn Italian because I wanted
to see the world for a period of time from
a different perspective. It was hugely helpful. It's the smartest
thing we ever did, was just to mix it up
(29:14):
like that and to get into a community where we
had never met anybody before, an apartment that we had
never lived in before, a city that we didn't know
it was really powerful.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Let's hit some topics the creative process. How do you
take an idea and to turn it into something tangible,
whether that's a business, a movie, or a TV show.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
I think the most important thing is that you don't
know where anything's going. So I always say, like, you
can't see the inside of the house from the front lawn.
You have to get into the foyer in order to
peek in and see the dining room and the living room.
So you got to do something first. You got to
go try something. If I want to make a movie
(29:57):
about birthday party clowns, I got to go around myself
and pick up parenting magazines and go look in the
back and see where the magician ads are. There's no
version of it where you can just imagine your way
into it. So I think that's such important thing. With
movie phones, starting by putting up a phone service and
seeing whether anybody would call it, and just telling hundreds
(30:18):
of people instead of millions of people and seeing whether
it picked up. So the working model being able to
get something on its feet that I think is really important.
Just getting your feet wet and feeling okay about not
knowing where it's going, not getting panicky about that, just
saying yeah, I don't know. I'm writing this essay. I
don't know what the end is going to be. Just
(30:39):
going to keep chiseling away at it.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Corporate culture, you built one of movie phone and I
suspect on all of your movies TV shows you also
have a culture of that group. What does the culture
do for you? How do you build it? How do
you use it?
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I always say in the very beginning, something in the
first group meeting or whatever that lets people know two things.
One is I have an idea of where we're going,
but I don't know where we're going. And the reason
I'm hiring the best people, and you guys are all distinguished, incredible,
talented people, is because I really want to hear from you.
(31:16):
I would say ten percent of the people take that seriously.
Ninety percent of the people still sit quietly meeting after meeting,
and it's always an effort to figure out who are
the ten exers, the people we used to talk about
at AOL. Who are the people that are just head
and shoulders, bigger contributors and nurture those people. You go
in that first meeting and you want everybody to contribute,
(31:39):
and pretty quickly you realize a lot of people are
just too shy to do it. And every once in
a while you get a really shy person who's all
so brilliant, and that person, if you can access them,
that's a lunch that you want to keep having or whatever.
A big part of it is just figuring out where
is the talent, Where are the people that are going
to bring you these ideas that are going to make
your thing work because you're not going to be able
to do it on your own.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
We couldn't have a conversation without mentioning two letters AI.
What's it going to do to the movie and TV
business and making the product?
Speaker 2 (32:12):
I'll tell you what I'm seeing right now, and it's
fascinating is we're using AI every day in making a documentary.
We're making the Part two of the Jinx right now,
and it's an enormous production and hundreds of subjects that
are being interviewed I would never use AI in a
(32:32):
finished film. I would never say, Oh, Bob Pittman just
did an interview and I made him say something he
didn't say. Obviously, that would be a total breach of everything.
But if I do a three hour interview with you
and you say everything except for the one remark I
need you to say to conclude your thing, I can
(32:53):
take your voice and make you say it, and then
when I'm watching the rough cut, there you are and
you're saying it. If I want to use it, I
will come back to you and I'll say, hey, is
this something that you feel comfortable saying? Or say it
in your own words. So right now they're AI lines
that are going into that film that will never make
it into the final film. But the fact that I
(33:15):
can have them in the rough cut means I can
move much faster in making the film. That's the big
ethical consideration. There's no question that there's a filmmaker sitting
there right now who's saying, well, I wish I could
get Donald Trump to say this thing, or I wish
I could get Joe Biden to say this thing, and
they probably use it. Right we're seeing that already, we're
seeing deep fakes, and we're seeing people saying things that
(33:37):
they didn't say. So that's the line is how do
you make sure that you're doing it ethically, but that
you're using it for the incredible acceleration that it lets
you get.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
Let's go to some advice for someone who dreams of
being a filmmaker. What advice can you give them?
Speaker 2 (33:53):
I would say, especially today, the technology is no longer
an impediment. Right Nolden days used to have to say, well,
I'm going to have to buy this camera, and I
have to buy some film, and I need nine people
to do it. You don't really need that. There's there's
stuff in the jinks in this next season that's coming
out that was shot on this iPhone, and you can't
(34:13):
shoot a whole movie in an extremely cheap way, but
you can do a lot of experimentation and you can
figure out whether you have something or not. So I
would say, same thing. Get your feet wet. You know,
you got to just go and try the first thing.
You may get it wrong, you may throw it in
the trash, but you're going to learn something.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
So for the major studios, you're on the front lines.
You always spend a lot of time on the cutting edge.
What's new? What advice can you give them from that perspective?
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Oh, it's so hard, right, because they make such enormous
mistakes all the time. They always have. They're trying to
do the best they can. My friend was telling me
the story of you know, Titanic was it Fox? And
it was this like incredible investment. There were two hundred
million dollars into it. Nobody had ever made a film
like that before, and Rupert or whoever said, well, we
(35:05):
got to lay this thing off. This is going to
be a disaster. It's probably going to go down like
the Titanic. They sell fifty percent of it, and then
of course the movie makes a billion dollars and everybody
is like, who's getting fired for this terribly stupid decision.
So whenever they're big bets like that, it's incredibly hard
to predict anything. I'm amazed that they do it and
keep their jobs. The thing I guess I would say
(35:27):
is they got to hire a lot of kids that
got to surround themselves with people that are younger than
studio executives, just because that's where the ideas are. You
want to welcome those people. You don't want to make
it hard for them to climb up the ranks.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
So if you could go back in time, what advice
would you give your twenty one year old self.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Ah, I think I was hard on myself. I think
I was beating myself with a big switch all the time.
And I think you know that you give your a
lot of scars by doing that. But it's not easy
to have a successful business, and you sort of feel
like you have to be your own task master. Everything
(36:11):
seems urgent, everything's so critical. Could have thought differently about
it at twenty one, I don't know, but I guess
I would say, you know, I maybe be nicer to me.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
So we end each episode of Mathemagic with a shout
out to the best on both ends of the spectrum
of business and marketing. The best at the analytics, science
and math, your dad, the best at sheer, creative promotions, etc.
Who gets your shout out for.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Each The thing I think is so special about my
dad is that on the business side is that he
really has no orthodoxy. If you walk in and you say,
you know, we should buy this company because blah blah
blah blah blah, he'll say, what if we just sold
the company like he just flips it all the time.
(37:00):
On the marketing side, I think it's the improvisational people.
There's a guy that I love, a guy named Deacon Webster,
who was the head of creative at an advertising agency
called Mad Dogs and Englishmen. He still runs his own
agency in New York, and whenever I'm needing to figure
out how to make something cool or how to get
(37:21):
it in front of more people, I usually just call
him up and I try to have lunch with him,
and He's worked on a lot of stuff with me,
so I like his ability to just think freely. Certainly
on the marketing side, that's so important because freshness is everything,
you know. It's so important for somebody to see something
that is not predictable, and I think it draws people in.
So those creative people that are willing to think outside
(37:44):
the box are really precious.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
Andrew, you have always been one of the most curious
people I know. You're blessed with being, as we see today,
a fascinating storyteller as well. You've managed to put both
of those together, have a wonderfully successful business life, two
smallest personal life. Thanks for sharing your stories and insights
today about how you did it and what you learned.
(38:11):
Here are a few things I've picked up from my
conversation with Andrew. One plan on pivoting. As Andrew says,
you can't see the inside of the house from the
front lawn. Starting a project with an open mind and
allowing it to evolve can ensure you end up with
the best possible outcome. Two. Sometimes collaboration beats competition. Instead
(38:32):
of trying to beat out another company with the same
model as moviefone, they combined efforts for a huge payoff.
Andrew's documentary work tells a similar story. Close relationships with
his subjects have made his work all that more compelling.
Collaboration can take on many forms, and you may wind
up working with someone you'd never expected to and the
(38:52):
rewards may be bigger than you ever anticipated too. Three.
Embrace changing technology. Andrew may not use use AI in
the final cut of his films, but that doesn't mean
it's not an asset during production. AI can be used
to accelerate projects and make workflow more seamless. Leaning into
innovative tech doesn't have to mean compromising the integrity of
(39:14):
your work, or even turning it upside down. Embracing new
tools for innovation can allow you to do the work
you excel at, just more efficiently. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks
for listening.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts. The
show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sidney
Rosenbluint for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is
no small feat. Mathemagic's producers are Emily Meronoth and Jessica Crimechitch.
It is mixed and mastered by Beheed Fraser. Our executive
(39:49):
producers are Nikki Etoor and Ali Perry, and of course
a big thanks to Gail Raoul, Eric Angel Noel and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
I didn't really think about it as a business at first,
and then eventually, when we put it up on a
bit of a lark, we started to see people calling,
and suddenly we were getting you have twenty seven calls
this hour, and then later I would call it and say,
you have one hundred and forty two thousand calls this hour.
Like that started happening, and we were amazed by it.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
I am Bob Pittman, and welcome to Math and Magic.
Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on episodes Today, we're
going to hear some lessons and stories from a man
whose life has been about curiosity and the unique skills
to turn that curiosity in the businesses and projects and
have fun along the way. Entrepreneur filmmaker Andrew Dreki. Andrew
(00:53):
grew up in the New York City suburbs in the
sixties and seventies, wildly successful and very curious parents with
an incredible workout think a family of high achievers. He
started one of those businesses everyone used in the nineteen nineties, moviefone.
I was at AOL when we bought it, and although
I knew Andrew before then I got to know him
a lot better after that. He co wrote a theme
(01:14):
song for a hit TV show, directed a movie with
Ryan Gosling, made a documentary that won eighteen international prizes
and was nominated for an Academy Award. He produced a
movie Catfish, and the HBO series The Jinx, The Life
and Deaths of Robert Durst, which led to his arrest
and prosecution. He's a fascinating blend between street culture and
(01:36):
the Ivy League. He's really funny, equally as nice, and
he also plays drums. Andrew welcome, Thank you. So before
we jump into the meaty stuff, I want to do
you in sixty seconds. You ready perfect? Do you prefer
cats or dogs?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Dogs?
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Early Riser or night Owl? Night Ol New York or
Los Angeles, New York? Cocher PEPSI Iced Team, Beach, your mountains,
beach or stones.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Everything is the Beatles, books or movies, movies, cook or
Eat out, Eat out comedy or drama comedy.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
It's about to get harder. First job, I was a magician,
all time favorite musical artist, Stevie Wonder, favorite TV show,
The Bear, Smartest person you know.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
My dad childhood hero, Willy Wonka.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Favorite movie Willy Wonka on the chocolate Factory technology. You
can't live without it.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I have a snowcone machine.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
I cannot live without that most important bit of advice
you ever got from my dad.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Don't just do something? Stand there, Favorite city, Rome, secret talent.
I was Duncan Yo Yo champion in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Have you lost a skill? Kind of Okay? Final one?
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
I think I wanted to be a filmmaker.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Let's start with moviefone. It was pre and early internet.
It was a way to get movie listings for people
who are young and don't understand moviefone. Everybody used it.
That's where you got the info about what movie was out.
You could buy your tickets there, and those were in
the days when you talked into a phone to get
stuff done as opposed to going on the internet. And
(03:15):
everyone really knew the voice of mister movie Phone. Give
us the origin story.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I was trying to go to the movies around nineteen
eighty eight, and I was calling my local theater, which
you used to have to do because the New York
Times didn't have all the show times in it. The
theater phone lines were always busy because the theaters didn't
understand that there were two thousand people trying to call
in a twenty minute period for that night. And I
got through at eight fifteen and the machine told me
(03:42):
that the movie had started at eight o'clock. And I thought,
why did I just ruin my night? And this multi
billion dollar movie industry doesn't get that I'm not able
to go out and buy my seven dollars then movie ticket.
So I thought, you know, voicemail was pretty advanced then,
and I thought, well, don't we create a service that
lets you push buttons. Maybe it's a free local service
(04:02):
and you put in the first three letters of the
movie title, put in your zip code, and it would
spit out just the theater closest to you, just the
information that you needed. I thought that would be a
cool thing for me to use. I didn't really think
about it as a business at first, and then eventually,
when we put it up on a bit of a lark,
we started to see people calling and suddenly we were
(04:22):
getting you have twenty seven calls this hour, and then
later I would call it and say, you have one
hundred and forty two thousand calls this hour like that
started happening, and we were amazed by it.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
And so that's the idea. You get it started. How
did you know how to turn that into a business.
Remember we were on the buying end of it. You
sold it for a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
It's true. And you know, I was very lucky because
my dad is a very smart business person. And you know,
he started out as a psychiatrist. He was a professor
of psychiatry at Yale, but he always had a business bug.
He was so smart about business. So I think I
immediately thought, well, this thing that we just put together
seems to be working for consumers. I wonder how much
(05:06):
I can promote it. I wonder how I can promote it.
I talked to my dad about it. I talked to
other smart people that I knew. It was pretty clear
that all of our customers were walking through the doors
of about five thousand cinemas in America. So if I
could get the number seven seven seven film in front
of people, up on the screens and trailers before the movie,
I also figured out everybody's motivations quickly. I went to
(05:29):
a bunch of conventions, Show East and Show West. I
didn't know anybody, and I just walked around talked to everybody.
This is the movie business in the movie business, and
I realized that nobody was talking to each other. They
didn't understand that moviegoers were having trouble going to the movies.
It was just a pain in the neck to do it.
And the studios didn't really control the theaters. The theaters
didn't control the studios, and I thought, well, there's a
(05:52):
window in here where I could make things easier for
the consumer and also make something that would be very
useful for the endo. So we just started to figure
out where are the little pinch points and leverage points. So,
for example, I knew that the theater owners had control
over their movie screens. At the time, nobody was doing
advertising on movie screens. So I said to the theater owners,
(06:14):
if I give you a thirty second ad for moviefone
and it's entertaining, will you put it up on their screens.
Knowing that they had a problem, which was that the
newspapers were charging them a fortune to put their movie
listings in the newspapers. The studios weren't helping them, so
they said well, if this guy's coming along, it is
going to do it for free. I'll give him thirty
seconds of free time before the movie. So that was
(06:36):
an example of some marketing thinking that helped us tremendously,
and it was a very you know, what do they say,
all marketing is local, you know, getting out into the
movie theaters, handing out little cards to people, getting that
message up on the screen. It sort of flowed naturally.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
And where did mister moviefone come from?
Speaker 2 (06:55):
The voice very interesting? The voice was very important and
if you call right now, you can't really hear it anywhere,
but if you call my wife's cell phone, you'll hear
hello and welcome to a Nancy phone. It became really
important to the brand. And it was lucky because when
I started the company in eighty eight eighty nine, I
found that there were a couple guys in Los Angeles
(07:16):
who were doing the exact same thing that we were.
We saw a little blurb about them in the Hollywood Reporter.
We called him up on the phone and I said, well,
I'd like to speak to the president please, and the
guy said speaking and I thought, well that's good. This
is a tiny little company, And so we decided to
join forces. And he was the voice. And he was
(07:37):
a guy from Idaho with a mustard colored suit and
big shoulder pads, and he had a big hairstyle. And
he was nothing like me. You know, I'd gone to
school on the East Coast and grown up in a
totally different way. But we had been working on the
same idea quietly for a long time. And I learned
by the way later from him that not only was
he the voice of movie phone and of very recognizable voice,
(08:01):
but that his mother in Idaho was the time lady.
She was the person you would call and she would
say at the tone, the time will be eleven forty
five exactly, boob. I thought that was kind of incredibic.
It's genetic.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
So why did you decide to sell the business?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
I had been doing it for around I think eleven years,
and then I ran into you. I went to the
premiere of You've Got Mail, which is a movie that
featured AO well, and it also had a little movie
phone blurb in it. It was Tom Hanks and Meg
Ryan are walking around and you hear the hello and
welcome movie phone, and I was sitting right in front
of you and the whole AOL team was there. And
(08:46):
I got up and you said to me, how you doing?
And I said good. He said, what's going on with
your business? And I had just been in these conversations
and I didn't know where the conversations were going. I
had a friend who was a banker, and my friend
said to me, what's going on? And I said, well,
I'm talking to Barry Dealer about this thing, and I'm
talking to this other guy about this thing. And he said, oh,
you're selling your company. And I said no, no, you
don't understand. I'm going to do a strategic alliance with somebody.
(09:09):
And he said, Andrew, I've been doing this a long time.
You're selling your company. And then you said, well, you know,
but come visit me. And then I had a phone
call with you and you said, listen, I'd love to
see you, but if you're going to come, just to
let you know, like big companies don't do strategic alliances
with little, tiny companies, like we just buy those companies.
So if that's on the radar for you, if that's
(09:30):
something that's possible, then we should get together. And I thought,
maybe that's right, Maybe that is how this is going
to end up playing out, so we started moving forward.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
This was your first big win, probably financially and probably
image wise and accomplishment. How did it change your own
self image?
Speaker 2 (09:50):
You know, it's a boost because you feel like this
thing that you've been laboring over in the shadows has
been noticed. It was clear to me also that it
was going to be fun process, that I was going
to learn something. I was going to learn something from you,
I was going to learn something from the people on
the deal. It was a new chapter to think about
taking this thing and bringing it into another company.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
You and I became pretty good pals after the AOL days,
and you always had a good story about something, And
I remember you said, you know, I'm thinking about how
I'm going to make a documentary about the clowns for
kids parties. Then the next time I saw you and
ask you how that film was coming along, you said, well,
it taken a strange and unexpected turn. Can you tell
(10:33):
us the story of capturing the Freedman's which, by the way,
was nominated for an Academy Award in One Sun Dance
and a bunch of other awards.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It was a very strange ride and a wonderful ride
in a lot of ways, because, as I said, I
was a magician when I was twelve years old, I
could charge thirty five dollars and I could go to
people's houses and entertain their children at the birthday party.
I had moved on and stopped doing that when I
was twelve, Yet these people were always in my mind
because they were interesting characters. You know, they call each
(11:03):
other by their clown names and real life, and Silly
Billy is best friends with Princess Priscilla, and when they
have issues in their relationship, they go to Professor Putter.
And I thought, this is a crazy, amazing community. I
bet there's a lot of humanity there. I bet if
I go talk to these people, I'll find an interesting story.
So I reached out to many of them and ultimately
(11:25):
settled on this guy, Silly Billy, who was the number
one guy in New York.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
And I remember Silly Billy from my kids.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, And if you were if it was a fancy
Park Avenue family, if you didn't hire Silly Billy, you
were not keeping up with the rest of the people
on Park Avenue. And I remember I kind of held
off on talking to him because I knew that he
had a big ego, and I thought if I called
him right off the bat, he would torture me. So
I waited until I talked to everybody else, all of
his competitors, and finally I called him and I said,
(11:54):
you know, I'm thinking I'm making this film and he said, well,
it's not much of a film without me in it.
And I said, okay, well fair enough. You know, do
you want to participate? Well, yeah, okay, come on over.
So I started to interview him, and ultimately I discovered
that he had a secret story and that his sort
of clown persona was something that he had been living
(12:16):
under for all these years. And I never thought there
was anything sinister about him, but I learned very quickly
that his family had been the target of a massive
criminal case where they had been accused of what at
the time was called a mass sex abuse case, that
they'd been accused of molesting hundreds of children. And I thought, well,
(12:36):
this is an incredibly deep and complicated situation where you
have somebody who's New York's number one children's entertainer and
his family is one of the most notorious families in
the history of New York. And then as I got
deeper into it, I found out there was a lot
more to the story, and in fact, it wasn't what
I thought when I first looked into it. And I
went back to him and I said, you've sort of
(12:57):
hinted things to me, just to let you know I
did figure it out. And eventually he said to me, well,
if that's what you're making a movie about, I don't
know how I feel about that, but I probably should
tell you that when my family was the subject of
this big criminal investigation and the police came and knocked
down the door of our house in Great Neck Long Island,
(13:18):
I had just bought a video camera and I started
recording the family falling apart, and that was one of
the most unique pieces of video, or about twenty two
hours of the most intimate, most upsetting, internal family discussions,
and they really traced what was happening to the family,
and that became a really important part of the film.
(13:39):
So the film shifted tremendously from what I originally thought
to what it became.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
You ever feel guilty about having that insider access, I mean,
what kind of emotions come up because suddenly you're right
in the middle of it.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Yeah, I mean, I found myself in that situation a lot.
I think that I come to it with an open heart.
I try to be fair to people. In that case,
it was up to silly Billy. It was up to
David Friedman to decide whether to let me use that material.
There was a multi month period when he had shown
me the material. I knew how powerful it was, and
(14:16):
he had not yet decided whether he was going to
give it to me or not.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
What lesson did you learn about product creation with this film?
I mean, we all talk in business about pivots. That's
a hell of a pivot.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
I think the most important thing for me is always
just to try to follow my intuition. There were many
times when I noticed little things about the story and
they made me curious, and I tried to stay open,
and I tried to be a good listener, because people
really do want to tell you their story. I remember
Al Masles, the great documentary filmmaker, said to me when
(14:52):
I was in the middle of capturing the Friedman's and
I was worried that I was going to expose this
family in a way, and they had had already been
very traumatized. You know, whatever you thought about them. They
had really been very damaged by it, and he said,
nobody wants to die without telling their story. You're doing
them a favor, and you're going to do it with
fairness and with love.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Catfish the movie, it's also a TV show? How about
that one? Give us the origin there and here you
are dealing with the unexpected again.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
This is a very strange way that you and I
crossed paths again, because that would never have happened if
it weren't for you, guys. I was in Los Angeles
working on a film and Nancy said to me, you know,
the Pittmans are calling and they sent you this thing
and there's this DVD. And I remember thinking, oh, right,
I got that DVD. I promised that I would watch it,
(15:47):
so I just started watching it at about midnight, and
I couldn't take my eyes off this footage. And it
wasn't yet a film, but it was the beginnings of something.
And it was a story about a guy, Neim Shulman,
who was a friend of yours and his brother and
their friend, and how this eight year old girl had
sent Neiva Facebook message saying Hey, I'm only eight, but
(16:09):
I'm a painter. I saw one of your photographs, and
I'd like to do a painting of it, would you mind?
You've said, okay, you can do it, and she did
this painting, and a few months later she sends him
the painting and it's quite good, perhaps curiously strangely good
for an eight year old, And they get into a
conversation with her mother, and the filmmakers start filming it,
(16:29):
and they meet not just her mother, but also her
sister who's nineteen, and a whole constellation of other people
in this little girl's life, and at some point it
becomes clear that maybe the story is not as innocent
as we thought, and then the boys go on a
road trip out to Ishpeming, Michigan, to discover what's really
(16:50):
going on and what's really behind this eight year old painter.
The story was so gripping when I was watching it,
and it wasn't even together yet, and I remember thinking
I can help, and we can help bring this thing
to the screen in a more substantial way, and we
agreed to work together on it. And then it was
a sun dance, and then it was a big hit,
and then it turned into this television show. But it's
(17:10):
another one of those stories that you think is going
one way and then goes a very different way.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Okay, I'm gonna do one last one and then we'll
get to some other topics. Robert Durst talk about a
strange twist and turn. I remember you made the scriptive
movie about him, and now I probably murdered his wife.
And then he calls you and things pivot, big Pivot,
(17:36):
tell us about it.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So I had been interested in the story of Bob Durst,
who had been suspected of killing three people but never
convicted and in fact, never really even tried for anything
other than one of them, and he had been acquitted.
And I thought that what was perhaps most interesting about
it was that he had this beautiful wife, and in
nineteen eighty two she disappeared and nobody knew what happened,
(18:00):
and tour and a lot of people suspected him of
killing her. So I started writing a screenplay about that
story and reached out to Bob Durst through his lawyer,
and his lawyer said, oh, Bob's a very private guy,
and you know he wishes you well, but he doesn't
want to participate or help you with your script. And
I said okay, and then we finished the film, and
(18:21):
there had been a little speculation while we were making
the film that while I was with Ryan Gosling and
Kirsten Dunst in Westchester shooting at a train station and
so on the scripted film, that somebody had been kind
of spying on us, that somebody was off in the
bushes or somebody was in a car nearby, and I thought, well,
that's crazy. Ultimately I learned that that was true. And
(18:43):
so the guy who had been so curious about it
was Bob Durst. How old was he at this time,
He was in his late sixties, and so he had
reached out through the distributor of the film, Magnolia Pictures.
Just one day he Amon Bowles, the guy who is
the head of the company, and we used to do
(19:03):
this thing where I would use Bob's voice because he
has a very recognizable voice. So we would just joke
around like that, and I would when I was hanging
up on the fastiar of the voice, I would say
if I was finishing the call, I would say bye bye,
which is how Bob says goodbye, and other things like that.
And so one day Amon gets a phone call and
(19:24):
the assistant comes in and in air quote says, you know,
it's Bob Durst on the phone. And he picks up
the phone, assuming it's me, and he says, oh, Bob,
I'm glad you're calling. And the guy on the phone says,
who am I talking to? And Amon says, oh, this
is Amon Bolts. Who is this? This is Robert Durst.
So Amon was very very nervous about this, and he
(19:45):
called me and he said, listen, Bob Durst wants to
get in touch with you. And he put us in touch.
And because I had Bob's cell phone number, because he
had made the first call, I was able to record
the first call I ever made to him. He and
I started talking and he said, well, you know, I
want to see the movie. I've heard good things about
the movie. I said, great, I want to show it
to you. I went out to LA I showed it
(20:06):
to him in a screening room. He called me right
after he saw it and he said, I want you
to know I like the movie very much, and let's
talk about doing something together. We started talking about maybe
doing an interview, and finally I did sit down with
him for three days in California and interviewed him about
all these subjects. That you know, camera rolling when you
oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We had three cameras because
(20:27):
I knew it was so unusual that somebody was in
his position and would be willing to talk about and
be asked questions about these three murders. And his position
was I didn't do any of these murders, but I thought, well,
he probably did, and I'm fascinated to see how he's
going to describe these things to me. So we did
these three days of interviews, and then it became clear
(20:48):
to me that it was going to require a reinvestigation
of the case, that I might be able to find
things that the police hadn't found. And then in fact
we did, and we discovered a piece of evidence that
tied him to the mur.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Like true crime podcasts before their time, Yeah, yeah, solve
the murder. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
It was a very unusual situation, and it was really
the first among the very first times that HBO or
a broadcaster like that had decided it was okay to
do a six part documentary series. Because it was so
much gripping material in it, there was no way to
do it. It's just a film, So it ended up
being this sort of behemoth and then what's unique about
(21:26):
it is that in the last episode he confesses, and
he confesses in a very unusual way, accidentally on a
hot mic in the bathroom, because I think he was
so burdened by this information, and I think he did,
in his own way, feel guilty and feel that he
had killed the person that probably loved him most in
the world, his wife. And so when I finished the
(21:48):
conversation and I show him the evidence, he goes in
the bathroom seconds later and he says, there it is,
You're caught. And then a few minutes later he's rambling,
because he does talk to himself. He's rambling in the
bathroom and he says, killed them all, of course, and
that became headline news. It was literally in the front
page of New York Times, I think three times in
(22:09):
a row this story. And he was arrested the day
before the final episode aired on HBO. That's never happened.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
And he was preparing to leave the country, correct, and
he was getting ready to go to Cuba. You went
through a long period with Durst in your life, eighteen years.
How did your family react sharing you with that obsession.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Well, I remember the last episode was sort of in
the offing, and Bob knew for a period of time
that the show was going to be very bad for him.
In the beginning, I think he thought, well, this will
be fun. It'll be the me show. I can say
whatever I want and they'll just film it and it'll
go on television. So for him, I think there was
(22:51):
a you know, there was just a narcissistic thrill to it.
But as it was clear to him that I had
found this evidence, and as I showed him the evidence,
he started to get more and more anxious about it.
And then my family started to get more anxious about him,
knowing that because he hadn't been arrested, and at one
point the FBI was trailing him, and I had an
FBI agent that I was talking to all the time,
(23:11):
and then one day he called me up he said, yeah,
we lost him, and so that morning I think I
got a security detail. And I remember meeting with my
daughter the night before. We were having dinner and I
said she was little at the time, and I said
to her, just so you know, tomorrow we're going to
have some other people with us when we go take
you to school, and she immediately started crying. So she
(23:31):
knew that it was an unusual time.
Speaker 3 (23:34):
More of math and magic right after this quick break.
Welcome back to math and Magic. Let's hear more from
my conversation with Andrew Dureki. Let's go back in time.
I want to explore your origins. You were a kid
of the sixties, seventies, and I guess early eighties. Tell
(23:54):
me about your family and describe how that moment in
time that fan shaped you.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
We went from when I was little living in New Haven,
when my dad was at Yale and my mom was
She was a writer and eventually became a writer of
Time magazine. And the two of them were very important
influences because my dad was very scientific and methodical and
became even more so in a way when he went
(24:23):
into business, because he's very numerous and so to some extent,
my dad was the math and my mom was the magic.
And I think that I always listened to both of them,
and I always had both of those voices in my ear.
And then we moved to New York because my dad
was starting a business. It was going to grow to
be a big business. My mom was a big influence.
(24:45):
And I think my mom, because she had actually had
been a film critic at Time magazine. My mom thought
about films, and she showed me films and we talked
about artistic things. My dad does not read fiction, doesn't
get it, doesn't understand why people read fiction. But those
two pieces I think were very important in giving me
permission to be interested in both to be okay with
(25:07):
math and to understand the benefit of business, but also
to listen to my artistics side.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
What did you learn in childhood that you still use today?
Speaker 2 (25:17):
I mean, one thing is that you know my dad
was tough and not always predictable, and he was in
that those early years, very mercurial. You never quite knew
what you were going to get out of him. My
dad was a genius. When he was in Germany as
a child, they used to test out the IQ tests
on him and he scored a two hundred and six,
(25:39):
and so I was. When I was a kid. We
would sit at the dinner table with him and say, okay, Dad,
fifteen six hundred and forty seven divided by one hundred
and forty two nine hundred and thirty, and he would
get like a dope look on his face and he
would say five boy and six nine seven three, And
I thought, Okay, well that's what I got here. I
got a brilliant guy who's not always going to be predictable.
(26:02):
I got good at dealing with complicated personalities. And Bob
Durst is an example of one. Billy Billy is an
example of one. It's something that kind of became a
little bit of a superpower.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
You went to Princeton. When you were there, you directed theater, right,
you were clearly going on a path. Why did you
veer off in the business after college? Whant I continue
that with creative bent?
Speaker 2 (26:25):
When I was in college, I had been doing a
lot of theater stuff. I had been reading a lot
of theater. I pursued it intellectually, but also directed plays
and produced plays. And interestingly, my senior thesis production, which
was a production of a play called Ubu, not only
had I done this sort of whole artistic thing, but
(26:47):
I decided that I wanted to do a marketing campaign
for it that would be like for a movie. And
so I had everybody on campus wearing these little buttons
that said Ubu. Nobody knew what it was, and we
ended up having sold out run for the entire run.
And that never happens.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
So my dad saw that happening, and I had a
professor at Princeton who said, I want you to go
to Yale Drama School for directing, because that's going to
be your thing. And I said that to my dad,
and I think he decided he was going to lobby
against it. And we had dinner together and he said, listen,
we have this big business. It's an incredible learning experience.
(27:26):
I get that you want to do the artistic thing,
but I want you to come into business for a
year or two. Once you learned what a treasury bill is,
and once you understand something about how you talk to
a lawyer, then even if you decide to be an artist,
you're not going to get screwed like all the other artists,
you know. And it was a pretty compelling argument. He
(27:47):
was selling the biggest of his businesses at that time.
There was a guy that was running it who was brilliant,
and he said, come work for George and you don't
have to deal with me at all, but this guy's
going to take you to business school. I put the
artistic stuff on hold, really because my dad thought it
was a good idea, and I thought I would listen
to him. As it turned out, I think it really
was an enormously important choice because I was able to
(28:09):
go back to artistic work after that, but with a
completely different set of tools.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
At one point in your life, you just picked up
and moved to Rome for a while kids everything. What
was that about?
Speaker 2 (28:24):
You know, I had sold the business. Thanks to you,
I was able to go do something completely different. And
I remember thinking, you know, my kids go to private
school in Manhattan, and Nancy and I were thinking, like,
we got to get him out of here and just
get him into a place where they're going to have
a new language and a new frame of reference. And
so we moved to Rome originally for a year, and
(28:46):
you said to me, don't move for two years, And
I said why not? And you said, well, one year
is great, but two years people stop inviting.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
You to things.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
You're off the radar. And I remember thinking like, he
might be right, but let me see how I feel
after a year, And we ended up saying for two years.
But it changed a lot of things in my brain.
I forced myself to really learn Italian because I wanted
to see the world for a period of time from
a different perspective. It was hugely helpful. It's the smartest
thing we ever did, was just to mix it up
(29:14):
like that and to get into a community where we
had never met anybody before, an apartment that we had
never lived in before, a city that we didn't know
it was really powerful.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Let's hit some topics the creative process. How do you
take an idea and to turn it into something tangible,
whether that's a business, a movie, or a TV show.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
I think the most important thing is that you don't
know where anything's going. So I always say, like, you
can't see the inside of the house from the front lawn.
You have to get into the foyer in order to
peek in and see the dining room and the living room.
So you got to do something first. You got to
go try something. If I want to make a movie
(29:57):
about birthday party clowns, I got to go around myself
and pick up parenting magazines and go look in the
back and see where the magician ads are. There's no
version of it where you can just imagine your way
into it. So I think that's such important thing. With
movie phones, starting by putting up a phone service and
seeing whether anybody would call it, and just telling hundreds
(30:18):
of people instead of millions of people and seeing whether
it picked up. So the working model being able to
get something on its feet that I think is really important.
Just getting your feet wet and feeling okay about not
knowing where it's going, not getting panicky about that, just
saying yeah, I don't know. I'm writing this essay. I
don't know what the end is going to be. Just
(30:39):
going to keep chiseling away at it.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Corporate culture, you built one of movie phone and I
suspect on all of your movies TV shows you also
have a culture of that group. What does the culture
do for you? How do you build it? How do
you use it?
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I always say in the very beginning, something in the
first group meeting or whatever that lets people know two things.
One is I have an idea of where we're going,
but I don't know where we're going. And the reason
I'm hiring the best people, and you guys are all distinguished, incredible,
talented people, is because I really want to hear from you.
(31:16):
I would say ten percent of the people take that seriously.
Ninety percent of the people still sit quietly meeting after meeting,
and it's always an effort to figure out who are
the ten exers, the people we used to talk about
at AOL. Who are the people that are just head
and shoulders, bigger contributors and nurture those people. You go
in that first meeting and you want everybody to contribute,
(31:39):
and pretty quickly you realize a lot of people are
just too shy to do it. And every once in
a while you get a really shy person who's all
so brilliant, and that person, if you can access them,
that's a lunch that you want to keep having or whatever.
A big part of it is just figuring out where
is the talent, Where are the people that are going
to bring you these ideas that are going to make
your thing work because you're not going to be able
to do it on your own.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
We couldn't have a conversation without mentioning two letters AI.
What's it going to do to the movie and TV
business and making the product?
Speaker 2 (32:12):
I'll tell you what I'm seeing right now, and it's
fascinating is we're using AI every day in making a documentary.
We're making the Part two of the Jinx right now,
and it's an enormous production and hundreds of subjects that
are being interviewed I would never use AI in a
(32:32):
finished film. I would never say, Oh, Bob Pittman just
did an interview and I made him say something he
didn't say. Obviously, that would be a total breach of everything.
But if I do a three hour interview with you
and you say everything except for the one remark I
need you to say to conclude your thing, I can
(32:53):
take your voice and make you say it, and then
when I'm watching the rough cut, there you are and
you're saying it. If I want to use it, I
will come back to you and I'll say, hey, is
this something that you feel comfortable saying? Or say it
in your own words. So right now they're AI lines
that are going into that film that will never make
it into the final film. But the fact that I
(33:15):
can have them in the rough cut means I can
move much faster in making the film. That's the big
ethical consideration. There's no question that there's a filmmaker sitting
there right now who's saying, well, I wish I could
get Donald Trump to say this thing, or I wish
I could get Joe Biden to say this thing, and
they probably use it. Right we're seeing that already, we're
seeing deep fakes, and we're seeing people saying things that
(33:37):
they didn't say. So that's the line is how do
you make sure that you're doing it ethically, but that
you're using it for the incredible acceleration that it lets
you get.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
Let's go to some advice for someone who dreams of
being a filmmaker. What advice can you give them?
Speaker 2 (33:53):
I would say, especially today, the technology is no longer
an impediment. Right Nolden days used to have to say, well,
I'm going to have to buy this camera, and I
have to buy some film, and I need nine people
to do it. You don't really need that. There's there's
stuff in the jinks in this next season that's coming
out that was shot on this iPhone, and you can't
(34:13):
shoot a whole movie in an extremely cheap way, but
you can do a lot of experimentation and you can
figure out whether you have something or not. So I
would say, same thing. Get your feet wet. You know,
you got to just go and try the first thing.
You may get it wrong, you may throw it in
the trash, but you're going to learn something.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
So for the major studios, you're on the front lines.
You always spend a lot of time on the cutting edge.
What's new? What advice can you give them from that perspective?
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Oh, it's so hard, right, because they make such enormous
mistakes all the time. They always have. They're trying to
do the best they can. My friend was telling me
the story of you know, Titanic was it Fox? And
it was this like incredible investment. There were two hundred
million dollars into it. Nobody had ever made a film
like that before, and Rupert or whoever said, well, we
(35:05):
got to lay this thing off. This is going to
be a disaster. It's probably going to go down like
the Titanic. They sell fifty percent of it, and then
of course the movie makes a billion dollars and everybody
is like, who's getting fired for this terribly stupid decision.
So whenever they're big bets like that, it's incredibly hard
to predict anything. I'm amazed that they do it and
keep their jobs. The thing I guess I would say
(35:27):
is they got to hire a lot of kids that
got to surround themselves with people that are younger than
studio executives, just because that's where the ideas are. You
want to welcome those people. You don't want to make
it hard for them to climb up the ranks.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
So if you could go back in time, what advice
would you give your twenty one year old self.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Ah, I think I was hard on myself. I think
I was beating myself with a big switch all the time.
And I think you know that you give your a
lot of scars by doing that. But it's not easy
to have a successful business, and you sort of feel
like you have to be your own task master. Everything
(36:11):
seems urgent, everything's so critical. Could have thought differently about
it at twenty one, I don't know, but I guess
I would say, you know, I maybe be nicer to me.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
So we end each episode of Mathemagic with a shout
out to the best on both ends of the spectrum
of business and marketing. The best at the analytics, science
and math, your dad, the best at sheer, creative promotions, etc.
Who gets your shout out for.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
Each The thing I think is so special about my
dad is that on the business side is that he
really has no orthodoxy. If you walk in and you say,
you know, we should buy this company because blah blah
blah blah blah, he'll say, what if we just sold
the company like he just flips it all the time.
(37:00):
On the marketing side, I think it's the improvisational people.
There's a guy that I love, a guy named Deacon Webster,
who was the head of creative at an advertising agency
called Mad Dogs and Englishmen. He still runs his own
agency in New York, and whenever I'm needing to figure
out how to make something cool or how to get
(37:21):
it in front of more people, I usually just call
him up and I try to have lunch with him,
and He's worked on a lot of stuff with me,
so I like his ability to just think freely. Certainly
on the marketing side, that's so important because freshness is everything,
you know. It's so important for somebody to see something
that is not predictable, and I think it draws people in.
So those creative people that are willing to think outside
(37:44):
the box are really precious.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
Andrew, you have always been one of the most curious
people I know. You're blessed with being, as we see today,
a fascinating storyteller as well. You've managed to put both
of those together, have a wonderfully successful business life, two
smallest personal life. Thanks for sharing your stories and insights
today about how you did it and what you learned.
(38:11):
Here are a few things I've picked up from my
conversation with Andrew. One plan on pivoting. As Andrew says,
you can't see the inside of the house from the
front lawn. Starting a project with an open mind and
allowing it to evolve can ensure you end up with
the best possible outcome. Two. Sometimes collaboration beats competition. Instead
(38:32):
of trying to beat out another company with the same
model as moviefone, they combined efforts for a huge payoff.
Andrew's documentary work tells a similar story. Close relationships with
his subjects have made his work all that more compelling.
Collaboration can take on many forms, and you may wind
up working with someone you'd never expected to and the
(38:52):
rewards may be bigger than you ever anticipated too. Three.
Embrace changing technology. Andrew may not use use AI in
the final cut of his films, but that doesn't mean
it's not an asset during production. AI can be used
to accelerate projects and make workflow more seamless. Leaning into
innovative tech doesn't have to mean compromising the integrity of
(39:14):
your work, or even turning it upside down. Embracing new
tools for innovation can allow you to do the work
you excel at, just more efficiently. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks
for listening.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production of iHeart Podcasts. The
show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sidney
Rosenbluint for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is
no small feat. Mathemagic's producers are Emily Meronoth and Jessica Crimechitch.
It is mixed and mastered by Beheed Fraser. Our executive
(39:49):
producers are Nikki Etoor and Ali Perry, and of course
a big thanks to Gail Raoul, Eric Angel Noel and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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