Studio Management Quotes

I basically was in charge of the Jackson 5 - all their creative, when it came down to the studio, and all their musical endeavors.

When you look at every studio in the '20s or '30s, from Louis B. Mayer to Jack Warner, you see people who started with one plan and quickly shifted gears to adapt to a changing world. One of my favorite stories is that Walt Disney mortgaged his house to make 'Snow White.' He saw there was a real opportunity to change the world.

I like the idea of working my way up. I don't feel impatient to immediately jump into something that could literally bring down a studio if I don't do it well.

Is Walt turning over in his grave? A man named Joe Roth runs Disney right now-he gave me the go-ahead and total freedom to do whatever I wanted to do.

I have three assistants, but there isn't a head assistant. All the important drawings I do myself. Every single character is also done by me.

Now women are rising to great positions and they run most of the studios now.

Yes, I would say I had quite a rough time from 1992 to 1996. After the highs of the Eighties, work became slow from around 1987 to around 1997. I was running a small recording studio in Shepherd's Bush but wasn't making a great deal from it.

If you look at successful studios, they're the ones with stabilized management.

In another time, another world, each studio made 200 movies a year and had 20 executives. Today, a studio makes less than 20 movies a year and has 500 executives. They own too many parking decks and too many billboard companies. They're awash in overhead, and it's pinning them down, and they know it.

When I photograph someone, I want to shoot the subject and get them out of my studio so I can play with the photos and do all the stuff I want.

Due to the hectic, non-stop nature of my work, I'm always using my BlackBerry to stay in touch with my studio, wherever I am.

Up until the time Turner Broadcasting bought Hanna-Barbera, it was essentially an independent studio whose planning cycle had to be nine months. You got a pickup in January, and you put it on the air in September. That's been the cycle.

The main trouble with Hollywood is that the guys you have to pitch to, the guys who run the studios, are all business school grads.

Since this was the first and only series I had ever produced, I was unaware of what the 'Normal' environment was for a studio. I tried to run it as I did in my SF studio.

I formed my own studio, carried my own deficits, owned one-hundred percent of my negatives, and made a lot of mistakes, but we ended up being the third largest TV studio in Hollywood.

I'm ready to run a studio. I'm ready to green light movies, and be in it to win it, you know? It's close. It'll happen.

I basically was in charge of the Jackson 5 - all their creative, when it came down to the studio, and all their musical endeavors. I tried to create a Hitsville on the West Coast.

As a director, my job is, and always has been, divided into a number of things: dealing with the crew, the money and the studio, and the marketing and publicity. These are all different jobs that have to be learned and done as well as possible. The celebrity part rarely touches a director.

My dream isn't running a studio or doing anything managerial in any way, shape, or form.

When a young woman tells me that she wants to become and actor, I say, 'No, be a writer. Or go to business school and learn how to run a studio.' The only real change will come from behind the scenes.

I was amazed at how the life of a freelancer differed from running a remote studio for another company. I thought I knew what I was doing in 2004 when I left Eidos because I had run Ion Storm Austin, which was my own independent studio. I had run a business unit inside Origin, but being part of a startup is crazy.

I heard, one of my producers told me this story where like the Hollywood studios brought all these high-end consultants in to try to figure out how to improve their process and make films more efficiently, and these consultants like studied the process for years and finally came up with this report they put together about how studios can improve the efficiency of their process, and the conclusion was "have the script ready by the time you're shooting.

Ashley Cheng, who I've worked with for 20 years, he's the studio head in Rockville now. He manages more of the day-to-day stuff. I can focus creatively on what we're doing now and what we should be doing in the future.

That's the only interaction I have with people, those talking shows. Most of the people in my phone book are artists, management, producers, engineers. I don't ever call people with, "Hi! How are you?" I say, "How are you? Do you have that 16/30 ready? When do you want me to come into the studio?" That's what I do.

And no again: My studio is not a first or any step toward becoming any type of businessman on my part.