Nina Jacobson Quotes

So I decided to form a production company with my wife and our partner Diane.

I don't know the figures, but Hollywood must buy 100 rights for every movie that actually gets made.

Some estimate Hulu IPO could bring in $2 billion. What will the content providers get? Zero. What is Hulu without content? An empty jukebox.

To try and stand outside the marriage, I'd say we have complementary capabilities. I do the hustling and the business. I do more script reading. I handle contracts.

I already have a production company called J Squared and we're working on two projects.

It would be nice to make a movie that other people want to make, because every one of these movies, I basically have to find the only company in the world that's willing to make it, and it's always a big challenge. I end up spending a tremendous amount of energy and time trying to get money to make these movies and it's exhausting.

There is a variety of different kind of producers. I'm a very hands-on, creative producer. I find material that I think would make a good movie or TV show, find the right financier/studio/network, hire a writer, get a good script, find a director, and collaborate with him/her to cast the movie and hire department heads.

No business can do everything. Even if it has the money, it will never have enough good people. It has to set priorities. The worst thing to do is a little bit of everything. This makes sure that nothing is being accomplished. It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

It's rare that I'm working on a movie and that's the case. My goal is the same, ultimately at a certain point you give it to the director and their vision. You're there to support that vision.

Strategy is choice. Strategy means saying no to certain kinds of things.

Why should a manufacturer bet his money, perhaps the future of his company, on your instinct?

Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.

Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the later than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never.

In the end, whether I write the script or, in this case, somebody else did, there's a point where you let it go when you're making a movie. You just have to. The thing that you shoot is not what you imagined in your head - it never is exactly that. And it shouldn't be.

The task of the strategist and leadership team is to reduce uncertainty in the areas that they can directly influence in order to pursue attractively difficult objectives.

Movies are grander, with (in my experience) more heavy weight chefs in the kitchen: the studio, the producers, the writers. All of them get to weigh in and you have to listen to all of them because they hired you. With TV, it's a way smaller scale, with only a few people weighing in.

It's always exciting to be a part of the development and creative process, and I hope to continue to do it. I feel like, especially in the comedic world, it's how things have to be done. You have to be a part of the motivating factor of getting the movie made. It's so hard.

Playing for complications is an extreme measure that a player should adopt only when he cannot find a clear and logical plan.

First, there has been a lot of interest in The Drive-in, but, alas, it hasn't actually come to fruition. Maybe soon. Don really got Bubba and I didn't think it could be a film. I thought it was too odd to make it to film. He asked me to do the screenplay, but I declined. I didn't see that it could be a screenplay but he wrote one and proved me wrong. He was always considerate about what I thought about the film and the story's presentation, but in the end, he's the director and he had to make decisions. All good ones.

There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is far worse or much harder to win.

I learned in architecture that you have to have a real plan. You have to have a client, they have to have distribution, start-up money, and have a vision of where it's going to go. All this has to be settled before you start, or else your work is just a story.

Where execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, then intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum.

[Make a sitcom] was really the idea of Executive Producer Joe Roth who owned the property over at Revolution Studios and said he was thinking about taking it to TV. And after he said that he already had [writer/director] Ali Leroi on board, and that he was going after Terry Crews, to me it was a no-brainer. I said, "Let's put this together!"

The selection of a subject is to the author what choice of position is to the general,--once skilfully determined, the battle is already half won. Of a few writers it may be said that they are popular in despite of their subjects--but of a great many more it may be observed that they are popular because of them.

You gotta choose what battles you can win.