Inside all the best Hollywood businesses the challenge is much the same: how to marshal the skills of people who like solving novel problems on a daily basis. As customers' demands for creativity, quality, price, and speedy performance increase, entertainment companies have been forced to evolve corporate structures that adapt quickly to change.
On any given entertainment project, such as Free Willy II, Cinnabar becomes part of a network that can include as many as 50 companies and scores of independent contractors. Ruck Goldreyer, the Cinnabar project manager for Free Willy II, is a veteran of countless movie, television, and commercial shoots. On the set he supervises the creation of a whole miniaturized environment -- from an ersatz ocean floor to a one-tenth-scale model of a doomed oil tanker.
"You get the fax with the specs from the producer," explains Goldreyer, a professional sculptor and former university lecturer. "You put it all together based on experience and craftsmanship. You bring that knowledge to each project."
It is precisely such knowledge -- based on experience -- that is critical to the making of movies. "It's all problem solving, and it's creative," says Goldreyer, who supervises 30 Cinnabar employees on this shoot. "Every shoot, every production is something new. That's what builds your knowledge and expertise."
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The Eternal Open Market
Constant learning -- the secret to network-economy success
In an era when graduate-level academic degrees are often seen as the keys to business success, Hollywood is one place where pure skill, artistry, imagination, and the all-important street smarts consistently matter more. All three members of the Geffen/Spielberg/Katzenberg "dream team" were college dropouts, something one would rarely find among the corporate studio bosses and executives, much less those who pull their strings.
Rather than formal training, the key to Hollywood success lies in learning a specialized craft and then fitting it into the network economy. That can include everyone from an actor or director to the thousands of less visible figures who make movies and television possible. Many Hollywood entrepreneurs see themselves not simply as businesspeople but first and foremost as artisans.
Many, such as Richard Hart, actually started out working as technicians, performing fairly routine tasks at the major studios. Hart got his first look at big-time Hollywood by sneaking over the fence onto the lot at MGM, just a few miles from his childhood home in Santa Monica. "We played out our fantasies of being part of MGM films," the gray-bearded, barrel-chested Hart recalls. "But it was just that, a fantasy."
For Hart, that fantasy eventually met reality. Through a friend, he got a job as a lighting technician at MGM. It wasn't like being a star or a big director, but it paid four times as much as pumping gas at his father's service station. Using the skills he developed over the next 20 years as a lighting technician, Hart eventually opened his own small company, Xenotech, which has become a global leader in the manufacture of customized xenon lights for the movies, television, and, increasingly, architectural markets. But Hart doesn't picture himself as an up-to-date information-age manager running a high-tech business. He sees himself as more of a medieval craftsman, working with other skilled artisans in the unique network of companies and people that make up Hollywood.
Hart's current success is hard-earned. He learned all the dirty and difficult secrets of lighting as he worked his way to the post of gaffer -- or chief lighting technician -- on scores of movies such as Vanishing Point, Lady Sings the Blues, Cutter's Way, and Best Friends.
"You develop a reputation; that's how I approached the business and learned my craft," Hart recalls in his unpretentious digs at Xenotech, his 18-person enterprise in North Hollywood. "I worked with the cameramen, the directors. Doing lighting was like being a framer on a home. It's the secret, it's the mood. It's what you see."
In 1980, however, Hart met a director and a lighting challenge that stretched even his talents and ultimately gave birth to Xenotech. Ridley Scott, director of the 1980 movie Blade Runner, wanted never-before-seen effects -- he called them "shafts of light" -- to portray his image of an environmentally devastated futuristic Los Angeles.
"This was a vision of Ridley's of what the future would look like," Hart says. "Basically, it was a very polluted kind of an atmosphere. The populace was constantly being inundated with advertising. And one of the effects he wanted to achieve was a feeling that would be unique to his film -- this airship of some sort that would look as though it had lights shining out of it and as though it had a message board similar to the Goodyear blimp's."
Making that dramatic effect required a unique kind of lighting. Conventional stage lighting did not suffice, so Hart rigged up 1,000-watt xenon lights previously used only for lighting up billboards. He retrofitted them himself for the rigors of shooting, making them more mobile and easier to handle.
When Blade Runner was released, film experts were astounded by the effect. "The shafts-of-light look changed everything," Hart maintains. "People wanted to see how it was done and knew I was the gaffer, so they came after me."
That unexpected demand suddenly cast Hart in the unfamiliar role of businessman. First he bought a few xenon lights and tinkered with them in a shed near his Northridge home. Soon he had a thriving little rental business. But demand continued to grow from advertising, television, and film clients. It was becoming clear he could no longer satisfy their needs for lighter, quieter, and easier-to-use lights capable of producing the shafts-of-light effect.
In 1987, with profit
