InformationWeek

October 23, 2000

Hollywood's New Star Is IT

For all its visions of the future, the movie business has stayed much the same for decades. But, finally, Hollywood is taking notice of IT.

By Jeff Sweat

More on Hollywood:

sidebar: Special-Effects shop conjures up a perfect storm

sidebar: Hollywood: The IT transformation is in progress

sidebar: Pixar animators push the limits of technology

VARBusiness: Masters of the interactive universe (10/02/00)

TechWeb: AOL-Time Warner set to blaze interactive trail (9/27/00)

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he was straight off the bus and desperate for her big break. "Take me to your trailer," she said to Creative Artists Agency CIO Michael Keithley, "and I'll do anything you want."

True, Keithley and his fellow Hollywood CIOs are emerging as stars in the entertainment industry. But they're not that kind of star.

Keithley was on the Paramount Pictures lot filming an ad for Microsoft's Active Server. The woman, who was part of a group of extras told to act as if they were clamoring for Keithley's autograph, assumed he was famous. He's not. But while a CIO may never be asked to sign autographs in real life, IT is taking a leading role in Hollywood by transforming the way movie and television studios, and everyone associated with them, do business.

Keithley is certainly in demand at CAA, the talent agency that shepherds the careers of scores of Hollywood A-listers, including Tom Cruise, Mike Meyers, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Matthew Perry. And as is the case for many of the people his company represents, sometimes it's the small performances--and the small performers--that get the most attention.

CAA's 200 agents have been making BlackBerry two-way pagers standard equipment ever since Keithley's crew linked them to CAA's Microsoft Exchange Server, letting the always-mobile reps read and reply to E-mail from the road. Agents like the system so much that they're throwing away their notebook computers and Palm Pilots, and even changing the way they commute. Some users who once traveled briskly through the canyons of the Hollywood Hills en route to CAA's Beverly Hills offices have switched to the infamously congested 405 freeway in order to use the traffic-jam downtime to punch their way through E-mail on the way to work.

Of course, the one thing more important in Hollywood than driving is who and what you know--and how you use that information. CAA's IT team has built an infrastructure that includes a heavy-duty Cisco Systems networking pipeline for multimedia data and a customized instant-messaging platform that supplements the verbal cues agents give their assistants while on the phone. It's the ultimate tool in a town where power is measured by who takes your calls, and vice versa. So if you're talking to Steven Seagal and Steven Spielberg calls, your assistant can message you that the director is on the line, and you can nicely nudge Seagal off the line.

Agents also rely on the BlackBerry's two-way paging functions to message one another when they're on a conference call, setting up a virtual good-cop/bad-cop routine. Keithley's team has even tweaked their BlackBerries to query CAA's Microsoft SQL Server database, so agents can pick up client and project information from anywhere. If a rep spies the president of MGM at Spago and wants to chat him up, he or she can query the database to get info on all current MGM projects, along with a list of who's been cast in each, who's directing, and so on. Armed with the details, the agent can cross the room with confidence--and the perfect pitch.

CAA has also adopted Hollywood's love of show-and-tell. One agent used to send others in the company his take on new musical acts, along with an audio tape, but it was rare that anyone bothered to listen. So Keithley's group gave the agent access to streaming audio and video. Instead of telling his co-workers that the Spanish-language musical group Man� is a Latino version of the Eagles, he sent around an E-mail with a video link. Another agent watched the film and hit upon the idea of booking the group on CBS's Late Night. What followed were TV appearances, a Grammy, and millions of albums sold.

Kim Spenchian Photo by Earl Miller None of this should come as a surprise (though one could be excused for not knowing the world needed another Eagles). As Keithley says, "This town is all about buzz. We have to be able to act on information quickly." But it wasn't until recently that Hollywood heavyweights made a real investment in IT. For all its fawning over the future--think Star Wars or 2001: A Space Odyssey--the movie business has operated pretty much the same way for 80 years. Directors and producers embrace new tools when it comes to making films, but on a business level, new technology generally means a fancy cappuccino machine.

"The movie is a perfect metaphor for technology in the industry," says Kim Spenchian, CIO of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. "You had a great scene in front, but when you went behind the scenes, there wasn't anything."

Case in point: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. still tracks sound-stage schedules by writing names on a giant bulletin board. The studio's idea of backup, jokes one IT executive, is to take a photo of the board so that if an earthquake hits, managers will know who should go where.