Finding out what sparked China's entertainment business success with Peter Loehr

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island of the gods. Asia is my home now. 60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts. It will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season 1 of The Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season 1, we're gonna take a deeper look at that. The rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking place all day, every day, right now.

Let's go.

Jai Ho!

Peter Lore, ladies and gentlemen, from the Big Apple. Awesome to see you, my old friend. Looking well. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining the pod. I've been threatening you for years that I'm going to chase you down like TMZ style and extract all of your amazing anecdotes and sort of lore and journey. And it's so great to see you.

Great to be here, Rich. Thanks for having me.

Oh yeah, that's great. So we got to know each other in Beijing and you're a legendary legend of legends in the film, music, entertainment industry of all around Asia, around the world. I'd heard about you for so long and so many years. And I finally got to know you socially. And then you came and spoke at my MBA class and I just love your journey. And I take us back to yesteryear when you were bitten by a radioactive gramophone or one of those old moving picture machines back growing up and your path to China or to Asia.

Yeah. So I studied international politics in school. I was always very interested in film and music and Graduated from university with a huge burden. I ended up going to work in a law firm as a paralegal, a firm called Skadden, Arps. And I studied Japanese in school, graduated, had a Rotary scholarship to study in Japan as my year abroad and graduated school fluent in Japanese and had the opportunity to go in the late '80s work at this law firm and really be focused on Japanese deals, which was an amazing a great learning experience. And I think it's where I met what I would consider the first of several really key mentors in my life. The guy who ran the Skadden office in Tokyo, where I ended up working for a year, Tony Zullo, was this sort of legendary, to use your word, lawyer who was one of the first foreign registered lawyers in Japan. He spoke fluent Japanese, fluent Chinese. He was this statesmanlike figure and was an amazing mentor to me and taught me a lot. And I think my experience at that firm over time really was a strong base for the career. We ended up in entertainment, which is litigious and covered by contracts. And I learned a ton. One of the first deals I worked on was the Sony Columbia deal. And I got some insight into the entertainment business through that and through the workings of a major studio that was being sold to international entity. It was a great experience. And in so doing, I got even more excited by the prospect of being in the entertainment industry and decided that instead of going to law school, which was the original plan, I would defer that for a year and go see if I could do something that I really aspired to that was really exciting for me. So I ended up deferring law school, going to work for a Japanese entertainment company called Amuse. And at Amuse, I sort of really met the second mentor of my life and in my career, actually. Dad and a lot of other great people are mentors as well. But career-wise, the chairman of Amuse, a gentleman called Mr. Osato or Chairman Osato, as we called him. Was a fantastic mentor, taught me the ins and outs of the business in very high-level situations and forced me to find my own footing, sort of trial by fire every day. And I worked at Amuse for about 6 years, 5 in Tokyo and 1 in Taiwan.

Wow. And you were there like during peak Japan too, right? Set against that backdrop of super intense Japan.

Yeah. At Luminary, I think it's 30% talent, 30% hard work, and 40% luck. And one of the things in my career that I've been incredibly lucky about was being in that Malcolm Gladwell right place at the right time kind of thing where I was lucky enough to be in Japan really at the height of the Japanese economic boom where people were taking chances and doing amazingly interesting things. And so from '91 to '95, I was in Japan and Taiwan as those economies were booming. And then in '95, I moved to China and was in China throughout. And I guess we'll talk about that more later throughout the opening up and booming of China, especially in the entertainment industry. When I got to China in In 1997, when I released my first movie, the entire box office was $100 million. And I think last year it was $9.6 billion. So you're looking at absolutely blind luck. When I went to Japan and started in the entertainment business, people thought that was sort of funny and interesting and quirky. Then when I moved to China to do it, people thought it was crazy because there really was no entertainment business.

But crazy like a fox though, because I think you probably could take some agency in that. You could smell it, right?

To be really honest, at the time I couldn't.

I just threw you a softball and then you—

I appreciate it. I appreciate it. But I really can't take that 20/20 hindsight credit. At the time, there were a lot of Chinese filmmakers I really wanted to work with. And I was fascinated by Chinese film and the stuff that was going on. And there was no such thing as a producer. And I thought that there might be a role for me in the amazing things that were happening. And so it was really creative more than it was—

Yeah. So speaking of creative, I love this story that you shared. With the MBA class, if you feel comfortable about it, talking about some of the music stuff that you did in Japan and some of the creative ways you shook some stuff up there.

Yeah, we worked in big teams and there were amazingly creative things happening in the Japanese business. And I was fortunate enough to work with great Japanese bands like the Southern All-Stars or Baku Slump. And I think at the time in Japan, the music industry was the second largest in the world. It was a CD-driven market and it was a crowded marketplace and people were doing amazingly creative things to market bands. Subways, advertisements, and just sort of across the board. And we worked in teams that did amazing stuff. I remember things like on the subway, not having enough budget to do the kind of subway ad we wanted to do and hiring kids to sit on the subway holding up the band's poster. Or things like that that we did in the space of, hey, there's not enough money to do this, but we need to do something interesting to stand out from a crowd. And that is something that really, I think, served what I did in China later, because we started out really on a shoestring with no budget for anything. Where almost all the marketing we had to do was going to be sponsor-driven and have to be creative and guerrilla-like. And the stuff that we did in Japan really informed that later process in China.

Yeah.

And then also the fact that you had access to the chairman. I always think of Japan as very hierarchical, one of the most hierarchical places where you really have to kind of pay your dues, but you had sort of this intense, I guess, almost like chief of staff or right-hand man turbocharged Mentoring through that?

Yeah, I think Amuse is a really unique place and you've got to lump that in with the 40% luck in my career. When I think of when I joined the company, there were about 150 staff and we all sat in one big giant room and the chairman was sort of in the best spot in the room, but there were no walls. And over the years, the company expanded a lot and now it's a listed company and there are hundreds of staff in a beautiful office. But when I was there, it was sort of the meat. The company was very ascendant and certainly becoming dominant in the space, but it was early in the overall arc of the company. And Mr. Osato was a very unique guy. I mean, he saw the world black and white. Things were either interesting or stupid. You were either smart or stupid. And if you were aggressive enough and did some smart things, he would take you seriously. And I think I was lucky from the very beginning. I was the first international staff the company ever had. I was the first, I think, bilingual person that ever worked there was me and 150 Japanese entertainment people. And that is either a recipe for disaster or a recipe for really interesting things to happen. And luckily it turned into the latter, but. It was very much a sink or swim place. And you just got in situations and you dealt with them. And I think the company had, for a Japanese company, relatively high turnover, but also a group of incredibly talented people that I became very close with. To this day, I'm still in touch with a lot of them. My time there was really special.

Wow. Love it. And then speaking of sink or swim, you also got thrown into the deep end willingly so into Taiwan from there, which was a little bit of a zig in a way. But one that was, again, pretty prescient and you kind of rode the music entertainment wave there, right?

Well, again, after working at Amuse, I think for 4 years in Tokyo where I sort of worked across different sections of the company. So I was in the international section and I worked on music and I had to work on films and I got to work on television. And after 4 years of sort of jack of all tradings things, I said to Mr. Osada, I would love to work in film production. And he said that he would put a think on that. And he said, no, actually, we're going to send you to Taiwan because the future of this company is Asian and we want you to open an office there. And you should learn about another culture, another language. It's going to make you ultimately a better executive. And that's what you're going to do. And at the beginning, it wasn't really what I wanted. And I went to Taiwan, we opened up a tiny office and luckily the market there was booming in music and television. And we were able to do a lot of licensing work of Japanese TV shows into Taiwan and make the small office quite profitable pretty quickly. At the same time, he had sort of left me in charge of the whole Asian region and I was traveling pretty constantly. And I had the opportunity to go back and forth to China a lot. I was looking at Chinese films. I was meeting Chinese filmmakers and I was traveling back and forth to China. And I realized there was no such thing as a producer and that maybe this was time to go out on my own finally. So Chairman Osato, I've mentioned many times already, he had gone out on his own at age 28 and formed the company Amuse after working at one of the biggest Japanese production companies and had been incredibly successful. And I was 28 and I felt like this was my time. And that's where I sort of came across the second big mentor, a third actually, in my career, which was the head of Roc Records, a gentleman named Sam Duong. And when Sam heard I was leaving Amuse, he called me in and he said, hey, if you're leaving, what are you going to do? And I said, I'm going to China and make an independent film company. And he said, well, how are you going to do that? And I said, I really don't know yet. One thing I do know is I need to speak Chinese a lot better than I do now, which was not very well. And that I was going to have to read scripts and argue with directors about dialogue and nuances in Chinese, which was going to require a super high level. And so I said, I'm going to sort of find my way here. And he said, well, why don't you take a year off? do the Chinese thing, come back in a year with a business plan. So that's what I did. I went to Beijing Normal University and Beijing Film Academy at the same time. I went to Middlebury in the U.S. first, an intensive program. And then I went to China and took classes at 2 universities at once, Beijing Film Academy in the morning, Beijing Normal University in the afternoon. And for the first 6 months, I really worked hard on the Chinese and started putting together a business plan and I ended up putting together a 90-page business plan and showing up in Taiwan a year later with the plan, which ultimately Sam Rock and another great friend there named Landy Chang, who was running their sort of alternative music label called Magic Stone, they decided to back my crazy idea. I think with the assumption on their part, they would fail after one film and I'd come back and I'd work in music again. And it'd be an interesting experiment just to see. And ultimately it worked and that became EMAR, which Stands for I am a rock for rock records, and that company.

I did not know that. I did not know that. Interesting.

Wow!

Fascinating. And your first movie that you produced?

So in 1996, we made a movie that came in 1997 called Spicy Love Soup.

And my friends are like, "You are need a lawai pangyo tai sure sure." Like you created something that's like. Zeitgeist, a classic for that time, my friend. Like, and it's like Chinese people can't believe they're like, there's a foreigner behind that. And of course you're going to say it's a team effort.

Yes.

But it was like, you got up to bat and you were like, it's pretty amazing.

Well, it was very early, right? And there was very few movies being made then. I think there was 60 to 70 movies a year being made in the entire industry. And now there's 700, 800. Most of the films were made by state-run studios. If I'm almost old, in order to make a film, then you had to have a license from a state-run studio. So our first company was a joint venture with the Xi'an Film Studio, which was run by a super enlightened guy who ultimately became the Vice Minister of SARFT later on.

Oh, wow.

But he sort of saw what we wanted to do and he decided to support us and we made a joint venture and he got behind that first film. I'd had a year to think about what I wanted to do and what kind of movies I wanted to make and what kind of movies maybe the marketplace would Embrace, and the decision we sort of came to was that there were enough propaganda movies out there, that there were enough period movies out there, and that the film market should be for young people. And nobody was making movies that sort of spoke to young people. So let's try to do something that's urban. Let's try to do something that that isn't period. No palanquins in the movie, and let's try to focus on a younger market, and let's use. A young director, preferably a first-time director, to make a movie for a young audience. So that was young directors for young audience, making something totally that wasn't being done. And I came up with the idea, if you've seen the movie, the opening of the movie where a guy is going to meet his wife's parents for the first time or his fiancée's parents for the first time, and he gets a horrible bout of stomach illness. That was actually my story. And I thought it was such a fun story that would there be a way to base an entire movie around a series of sort of short vignettes rather than doing it one big story. I came up with that idea. I had met Jang Young, who became the director, who was a music video director at the time. This was his first film. I liked him a lot. And he said, hey, wait a minute, instead of doing 5 young people's stories, let's mix up the ages and let's do young people's story and an old people's story and a post-marriage stress syndrome story and a divorce story. And I thought that was great. And so we started to develop those 5 different stories. We used 5 different writers each to write a story. It took us, we thought it would take just a few months because the stories were short. It ended up taking almost a year, finished the screenplay. And now all those directors, all those writers actually are all award-winning directors. So all of those guys was their first movie screenplay. And, you know, Sai Zhangjun, who was one of the writers, has won in Venice and Diao Yinan, who is one of the writers, has won in Berlin. And Liu Fengdou, who's one of the writers, has had films in Cannes. So we had a really talented group of people trying to do something that seemed easy and it ended up being very hard. And then we made this film and we sort of did everything different than everybody else. In addition to the overall thematic differences and the style of shooting, what the movie was, we sort of budgeted it differently, shot it differently, marketed it differently. And the film really performed super well at the time. So it was one of the first films in China to do 30 million RMB box office. There were 2 films that year. It was Spicy Love Soup, and there was Jiaofang Yi Fang, Party A, Party B, which is a Feng Shui Gong movie. And those are the 2 movies that sort of suddenly defined modern commercial filmmaking in China.

Yeah, defined it indeed. Yeah. And tell us about some of the screenplay took 12 months instead of 3 or 4, like first-time producer. I mean, like as a producer, you're the guy that's got to make sure there's gas on the bus, where the bus is going, and you got to get people on the bus. But then there's 50,000 other problems behind the scenes and on the scenes. Tell us some of the trials and tribulations and triumphs of that first time around for you.

Yeah, it was a very small budget movie. So we're talking about a 3 million RMB movie. So at the time that equated to about $350,000, right? And we thought we were very clever because by shooting shorter stories, we would need the actors for very short periods of time. So instead of saying to an actor, we have no money to pay you, but please come make our movie, we can say, we have no money to pay you, but we only need you for a week. Because each story, basically the whole movie was shot over about 33 days. And if you divide that by 6, you're looking at 5 to 7 days per story, depending on the story. Some were faster, some were slower. But the trick was that that was very clever and that did work. And we were able to get amazing talent for not a lot of money because we didn't have a lot. But a lot of that was sort of our earnestness and our sincerity in the way we approached everybody and how passionate we were about what we were trying to do. But what we ended up with was a lot of actors. So instead of having 2 or 3 main actors, you end up with 12. And that got complicated. So there was a lot of discussions and the film was so low budget and we were not shy about approaching really major actors and saying, please read our script. We'd love to have you in the movie. And by the way, we have no money. And one actress said to me, I think you guys are adorable. The fact that you would even say that number, I shouldn't be insulted, but I think the fact that you'd even say it out loud, it's sort of amazing. And there was another actress that we met and we sat down and she, at the time there were no agents and no managers and you literally sat down directly with the actor, had coffee, or sat down in a hotel lobby and talked about the screenplay. There wasn't really a process. I just remember one actress saying, hey, meet me in such hotel coffee shop and thinking like, how are we going to pay for this coffee? Can we please go somewhere else?

5-star hotel coffee. It's ridiculously overpriced.

Yes. So I was thinking, how do I get her to go somewhere else? And then the director looked at me and said, we just got to go there. We can't do that. Like, that's not something— the optics of that are going to be very bad if we change venue because we can't afford the coffee. So for those of you who know Chinese cinema well, we had a lot of people in that movie. So Lu Liping is an amazing actress who award-winning. Fu Sunxin was an amazing stage actor who went on to run the People's Theater in Beijing. And Xu Jinglei, who became a star director and actress in her own right. This was her first movie. And Guo Tao, who had been in Zhang Yimou's To Live, was in the movie. Xu Fan, who became a huge star in Feng Xiaogang, was in the movie. So we had just stars sort of across the board. Wen Xingyu, who was in a hugely successful TV series called Why I Broke Up. Was one of the older people in the older story. And we had this amazing cast who went on to become the backbone of the industry for years to come, all in one movie. And at the time, to be honest, we were just going for the best person for each role and being unabashed about it. And there was really no one who said no. When people approached, also had the fortunate backing of Roc Records who allowed us to cameo some very major music stars. And so Joe Hagen was in the movie.

Yeah.

Lee Zongsheng, Jonathan Lee, and Zhao Chunlin was in the movie all for seconds. I mean, they cameoed in because all we could afford was their flights. Couldn't even really, I think Sam said to me at the time, like, don't bother paying them. It'll be embarrassing. We're just going to say no pay because it's better. And luckily he had the face to invite them and they agreed and they came in and shot for an afternoon and went back home to Taipei.

Everybody won. That's great. Wow. Fascinating. I never really. peeled back. There's many reasons why that film has become so iconic. And thanks for sharing. That's great. I love it. So then, so then how do you follow that? Like what's next? But wait, there's more. It wasn't, you weren't a one-hit wonder or some sort of first-time author who crushes it and then has no ability to write a follow-on book. Kept going. Yeah.

Movie next called A Beautiful New World, which is by another young director named Shiren Zhou, is also his first movie with Tao Hong and Zhang. who became sort of a mainstay of a lot of our movies after that. And that went really well. And then we made a movie called Shower, which was the first movie that really performed internationally. So we were sort of hoping to capture magic in a bottle and have a film that worked in China and a film that worked outside of China. And the first 2 did very well in China, and Shower was the first one that performed everywhere.

That's how I saw that before. That was the first thing I saw before I met you. Yeah. Not many people really watched that much. Chinese cinema. And I think a lot of people, unless you saw like Raise the Red Lantern or something like that, but that was something that I think gave people insight into, you know, what's actually happening in China. I think people even till today still have no idea about what's going on in China.

Yeah, it's funny. A lot of times when you're approaching something, it was the same director of Spicy Love Soup. And we started out thinking about doing something similar and trying to do a series of vignettes about the importance of water and bathing in different countries. And we originally wanted to do something in Japan. And something in Beijing and maybe something in Eastern Europe. And we had this idea to do that. And then we thought, no, we did that once already. Let's try to make one story. Let's just try to focus on one story. And ultimately we came up with this story and everybody we talked to said pretty much the worst idea we've ever heard. So here's a movie with no love story, with no action, very few, almost no female characters. It takes place in a bathhouse with— A lot of older semi-naked men. And why would— the bathhouse is not a lovely bathhouse. It's a very real sort of Beijing at the time bathhouse. So it's sort of down on its luck and run down. And why is anybody going to watch this? And we just felt like the story was compelling enough and had something to say. And what we were trying to say is that there's a lot of magic in old Beijing that's disappearing. And everything's being torn down and these old great hutongs and lanes and sort of customs and traditions are going away and these great skyscrapers going up and everyone has indoor plumbing and that's all fantastic and necessary and inevitable. But there's some great stuff that's being thrown away with the bathwater. Wow. I can't believe I just said that. I didn't do that on purpose. It just happened. So we made this movie and we had been working with a company called Fortissimo Films a lot who was helping us sell international rights on our films. And they looked and they said, this is the movie. This is amazing. It's magic. We love this. Yeah. And so Michael Werner and Lotte Baron-Drech, who were there at the time, and, um, took this film and it ended up going to festivals all around the world and winning. So the film, I think, won 11 awards at 13 festivals and Sony Classics bought it in the U.S. And suddenly we had a movie that did really well in China and did really well everywhere else. I mean, at the time, the big news story in China was the import of Western films were coming in.

Yeah.

And the big tagline we sort of used to market the movie in China is China used to only have import films, but now it has export films. And that we were taking this film to the world and it was being embraced and China should also embrace its own. And that we were lucky that did happen. So the film also, for a film that was quite, I don't want to say arty, but less obviously commercial. No pop soundtrack like Spicy Meatballs, Love Soup, and View from the World had no cameos from music stars. It had no love stories. It had nothing like that. Still. Actually outperformed both of those at the Chinese box office. So very fortunate. Yeah.

Resonated. Yeah. It resonated with me. And I would even ask people, kind of baffled some people in my family, like, why are you even in China? And I remember like, yeah, just check this out. And like, there's a soulfulness and like, it's the thing. I just love Chinese people and I love Beijing. And there's something that's part of this whole podcast and book that China, an adversary in some areas militarily or ideologically, but Do we compete? Yeah, we definitely compete, but also cooperate as well too, right? And I think we need to engage. And I think the more people can understand and exchange ideas, and unfortunately it's probably becoming somehow less easy to do that these days.

Yeah.

I think that movie for me, I think my parents, especially my father, thought I was sort of this quirky child who had run away to Asia and was doing something that nobody really understood. And on a shower, that film got invited to the new director section of the New York Film Festival, which is a huge honor because the The New York Film Festival sort of selects films from other festivals around the world that they feel need to be curated and shown to a New York audience. So it's sort of like the best of the best get invited. And it was this amazing thing. And I told my dad and he thought, oh my God, my son's Chinese film is going to come to New York. Nobody's going to watch it. So he tried to bring like 20 friends to fill up the theater. And when he got there, he realized it was sold out and they were going to have to wait for a later showing. And it was this sort of shock that my son maybe is actually doing something semi-meaningful.

Quirky like a fox.

Yeah, exactly. So that was it on a personal level. That was also a big role.

Yeah. Huge. I love it. And then let's continue on the hero's journey, like out of the cave and what's next?

So after producing about 5 or 6 films in 2001, I made a new company called Ming Productions. And that company was invested by Mr. Osato from my old Japanese company, and he's the formation of that new company. And we started to produce more international movies, uh, and movies that we thought would speak to a Chinese international audience, that there was a moment happening. And I decided that I needed to have a real team instead of being sort of a guy chain smoking cigarettes and doing everything by myself. I needed to have a real lawyer. I needed to have an agent and I needed to have an international team in addition to Fortune, but like sort of a team around me helping me take it to the next level. And so I was fortunate to sign to CAA as a producer. So I became a client of CAA as a producer, and I worked a lot with a guy named John Patak, who was sort of their original legendary international finance guy, and Rand Holston, who was an agent who worked with great talent like Wolfgang Petersen, Stephen King, and all— Wick, and just great filmmakers. Started to sort of build out my footprint a little bit that way. And in 2005, that led to a moment where I Suddenly went to work for CA and Richard Lovett, the head of the agency, asked me to help them build and start an office in China. And from 2005 to 2012, I did that with a colleague. You also know Jonah Greenberg, who had been working with me.

Jonah Greenberg indeed. Yeah.

Jonah had been working with me at Ming Productions and we went over to CA in China, which we started with me and Jonah, one office manager and one assistant.

Shingle.

Yep.

Love it. It's a juggernaut now.

No, they've done amazingly well. And I've been gone a long time and Jonah did an amazing job after I was gone. But from 2005 to 2012, we really built a business. A lot of that was based on the models that sort of C.A. and Richard showed me. They said, start with writers, work with writers and directors, and actors will come. And I think in 2008, we were working with almost all the top directors in China. A lot of which were very close friends of mine. So of course, I was Ning Hao's agent and John Woo's agent and CA had signed Ang Lee and Ang Lee was a client.

So it's actually like you lived in a xiaochu, like a compound in Beijing that was known for other directors, actors, like film industry people. And I'd been over your house a few times and you are so deeply ensconced in that universe, right? And there's so few. Foreigners really. And they were truly like your close friends, right? It's like when you said, oh, I went to work for CAA, it's like CAA had the person who was genetically engineered, best person to like come in and do that bridging between LA, the mothership in China. And it's pretty, you were able to dominate so quickly because you had such high levels of trust and just like goodwill. Yeah.

Those guys are obviously, you don't need me to tell you how smart those guys are. And their sense of timing when it was time to actually come into China and open up an office. was perfect, as their timing so often is. And Richard, Brian, Kevin, and Rand, and all those guys who decided that we're going to make a China business, even though it may not be profitable at the beginning, we're going to take a run at this. Their timing was spot on. I had been there at that point for almost 10 years.

Wow.

Well, yeah, almost 10 years. And because I had been there when nobody cared about the business and pretty much anybody could call up anybody and go sit down and have lunch or dinner or coffee because people weren't so super busy. There weren't so many people who were really trying to make things happen. I was able to make a lot of great relationships because the first few films worked so well that really helped cement those relationships and also make me relevant to people that maybe I wasn't working with yet. And because there are so many people that talk the talk and so few people who actually did very much, us being able to not only talk about it and have vision for what we wanted, but to actually execute.

Execute so well. Yeah.

It was relatively unique at the time. And so when suddenly we're going to make an agency and represent directors and writers, which nobody had done before. Right? Actors were starting to have managers, but nobody ever thought of signing a director as an agent or a writer as an agent because they don't have endorsement income and because they don't do big appearances that they get paid for. They don't go to Gucci parties that they get paid for. It just seemed like such a small thing to do, but we thought this all came from CAA and Richard. They said, look, if you represent those guys and you're helping them make their movies, then you have the opportunity to package things. and you have the opportunity to say, hey, let's work with our writer, our director, and let's bring our talent into these filmmakers' projects. And, if you have the ability to do that, then that talent will want to be with you. And ultimately, that's what happened. In 2008, I think CA was able to, you know, while I was there in our 3rd year, we were able to package 8 of the top 10 movies in China that year. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And, and work on productions and really build out a business. And when I left in 2012, I think the business was really cooking and Jonah took it over and took it up 2 more levels. Now CA is a big concern that really spread across every element of the Chinese entertainment space and is doing amazing work. So I'm proud that I was there at the beginning.

Great legacy.

They've done what they've done since.

But then another, uh, amazing peak back in, in 2012, when you had another super powerful personality, which the entertainment industry, I guess, is somehow notorious for knocking, and you're still connected with him today. Tell us about that transition. Yeah.

So in 2012, I thought it's time. I had learned so much at CA and I had represented so many different types of people into the China market, you know, from athletes to writers, to novelists, to endorsements, to all kinds of things that I had never touched on as a producer. So in terms of my overall career development, that was a really essential 7 years. I mean, I learned so much and I was taken out of my comfort zone. So often that it was an amazing experience, and it was also amazingly stressful and difficult and hard doing seven eight hundred emails a day and a hundred to hundred fifty phone calls a day, and working across what had become such a large client list. I felt like I needed to get back into making films. It was time to sort of get out of packaging and representation and back to films, and it was a very hard decision to make because I was working with such an amazing. people, but I decided that's what I was going to do. And I started surreptitiously talking to people and trying to figure out where I was going to go. And while I was at CAA, I'd come across Thomas Tull. Richard had introduced me to Thomas, who was running a company called Legendary. And I'd gotten to know Thomas because he was trying to build a China business. And I had been able to give him some advice, some good, some bad. I think some of it he appreciated, some of it, you know, and when I was getting ready to go, I was talking to one of the major U.S. studios and I was talking to A big Chinese company and the news sort of leaked out that I was leaving and Thomas called me up and he said, in Thomas's way, because Thomas is a force of nature. And if I'm going to do this mentor list, of course he's on it. He's the only one on it that's younger than I am. But Thomas said, hey, wait a minute, are you on the market? And I cut a couple expletives out of that statement because what had happened is one of the people I was talking to had leaked to the press that I was considering going to work for them. And that has sort of forced the situation a little bit. And that's how Thomas knew about it. He said, here's what we're going to do. You're going to just hold on a second and I'm going to send you an offer tonight. And tomorrow you're going to shake my hand on the phone because it's going to be good enough that you're going to do that. And I said, wow, well, give it your best shot. I'd love to see what, you know, what you have to offer, what you have to say. And the next day he did that. And in Thomas's, you know, inimitable way, while everybody else was sort of doing nothing over the weekend, Thomas was calling me 3 times. Thing home and by Monday it was done. And so I had this great opportunity to work for a company, again, legendary, which was absolutely ascendant at the time and had an amazing team. Thomas running the whole thing and John Jaschny running creative and Marty Wilhite, who was the CEO and running legal. It was just this amazing team of guys and women too. It was just a great group of people. And I was sort of tasked with 3 things. One was effectively distributing the legendary films, the films that made by the U.S. studio in China. So films like Pacific Rim, Godzilla, and Warcraft. What could we do with those films in the China market? And second, bringing on partners. So strategic Chinese partners who could help release those films better, help market those films better, and who ultimately could become investment partners in films like that. And then also making big Chinese, Chinese-U.S. co-productions. So there was sort of a 3-tiered approach. And I did that from 2012 to 2017. And it ultimately resulted in us selling the company to a Chinese company named Wanda, who we had worked with very closely. And they ended up buying Legendary Lock, Stock and Barrel and taking it off the table.

Yeah.

And that was a multi-billion dollar deal.

Yeah. Yeah, it was.

And that was something that you initiated that partnership with Wanda because they're also headquartered in Beijing. Yeah.

When I was at CAA, we represented Wanda when they were looking to purchase a U.S. theater chain. And I had the opportunity to work with them as they bought AMC, the U.S. chain.

And you got to know Wang Jianlian, is that his name?

I got to know Chairman Wang and I got to know some of the key people there, Jerry Ye and Jeffrey Liu, the CFO and head of the entertainment company and Lincoln Zhang, all through that period of advising on AMC and Thomas. In 2000, I want to say 2014, maybe '15, was going to come to China and he sort of wanted to meet everybody in the industry. And I said, okay, well, you've got to meet these guys. And again, the Chinese industry was taking off, but it hadn't really reached that sort of super critical mass yet. And I still had Jeremy Walton's cell number and I texted him and I said, hey, I'm at a new company now. And my boss is coming in and Jeff Shell, who was running Universal at the time, was coming in and let's set up a lunch for everybody. And we set up a lunch and everybody really hit it off. And that led to a slowly gestating several-year process of Wanda's first investing a small amount into Legendary and ultimately buying the whole company.

Wow. Excellent. Yeah. Amazing transaction. Life-changing transaction, like career-defining indeed, right? There's not many multi-billion-dollar full acquisitions.

I think it's the only one, US-China cross-border media.

Yeah. I mean, in general. Right? Like it's still the whole acquisition by recently, right? There still aren't that many deals in general globally and definitely the, the one in China, right?

Chinese-US entertainment transaction.

And talking about size, I loved some of the stories you shared of producing The Great Wall and the sheer amount of extras and all of the moving parts in trying to get that. That wasn't a bunch of CGI. There was a lot of Chinese people on the Great Wall of China and you needed to get— can you share some stories about trying to make all that sing together in harmony?

Yeah, I think The Great Wall is a— there's a lot of stories on that film and it's a cautionary tale in certain ways, but it was an amazing experience. And when we were going out to try to make this huge Chinese-U.S. co-production, we looked at who's the best possible director for this and Zhang Yimou had just done the Olympics and Was this amazing Chinese filmmaker. We thought he was the perfect director and we were lucky enough to have him. And looking at U.S. actors, Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal, who just did Game of Thrones, and Willem Dafoe, you know, amazing action hero, put together a great U.S. cast. And we had Tony Gilroy writing drafts of the screenplay who had done Bourne. And we had ILM doing the VFX who had done Star Wars. So we put together all these pieces. You know, ultimately the film performed very well in China, not as well as we wanted to in other places, but it was this massive scale. You just mentioned the actual wall itself. I mean, we built what we think is probably one of the largest film sets ever built. So a 250-meter-long wall that was built on a piece of land in Qingdao that was long enough and low enough to ride horses on and put thousands of extras on. We didn't shoot on a real Great Wall, but we built this incredibly huge set and we had a crew of about 1,100 people on the biggest day. There were days we had thousands of extras because of the number of soldiers that we had to place. So it became a logistical sort of military type thing. I mean, literally every day we had to bus people in, put armor on them and feed them, put them on the wall and shoot them and feed them again and put them back on the wall. And people marching around in formations and carrying spears and shields. And it was quite the experience. And I think everybody who worked on it, the scale of it was just massive.

Massive indeed. Yeah. And when I said they were on the wall, they were actually, it was actually A replica, right? It reminded me of what the Wachowski brothers did for Matrix when they built those elevated freeways to do those scenes, because they couldn't find anything, but this is even bigger scale. So yeah, just fascinating. Wow. And these days you went and built a beautiful dreamboat, literally, and you've been sailing around the world, but also you're using some movie metaphors. Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in. And you talk about Thomas Tull being a force of nature and I'd never met him, but you yourself have the forces strong with this one. You have too much to give to the universe and the universe has too much a demand of you for you to just continue sailing around the world. So tell us what you're doing these days.

It's funny. So when the legendary sale happened and I decided I was going to leave, I had to have a year of gardening leave where I was, I had a non-compete and I wasn't allowed to work anywhere. And so we sort of had a year to think about What it was that we really wanted to do. And it led to a lot of sort of deep thought with my wife over dinner and thinking about what's next. And I think we decided that there were going to be some parameters that defined the next third to half of our lives in terms of what we did work-wise. And the first was we didn't really want to be CEOs again. I didn't want to be working in an office running a big operation. I wanted to do things I was passionate about and focus on those things. And that I wanted to have a hobby for once in my life because I'd been working 18 hours a day for 25 years working weekends and never really had any hobby at all. So we wanted to have a hobby and we wanted to really focus on the stuff that we wanted to do and allow for some free time as well. So now we're doing sort of 3 different things, or I'm doing 3 different things. One is I'm producing a movie called Golgo 13 that is based on a really iconic piece of Japanese IP. It's actually the longest running manga and the second biggest selling manga ever. So it's been in circulation since 1968, and the same writer is still writing it, and he's amazing. And I used to read this comic when I was studying Japan in 1987. It was a comic I used to read back then, and actually Amuse, my old boss, Mr. Osato, called me in 2001 and had me develop a screenplay for it for a year, and ended up not being able to get the rights. And it went away, and then a very good friend of mine, Samuel Hadida, did get the rights. And he unfortunately passed away, and now I'm producing it with his brother, Victor. Who runs Metropolitan, which is a huge company in France and one of the most successful distributors, exhibitors there. That's a movie that I've gotten really excited about. And we have a director attached. We have a finished screenplay. We just translated it into Japanese. And it, so that's sort of ongoing and we're really excited to make that movie next year. I'm also on the board of IMAX China Holdings, which is IMAX's China company. And that IMAX's company, I've had a relationship with them since back in the days of CAA when they were clients. And Rich Gelfond, the chairman, has always been a close friend and somebody I love working with. So I'm doing board work with IMAX right now. And you just talked about Thomas. I'm working with Thomas on a company called Genies, which is in the NFT space. Lucky enough to work with Thomas again as he identifies the next home run. And we've been working on that for about 2 and a half years now. And the company's really grown from a very small group of people over a taco stand in Venice to being a company that's Raised significant money at high mid-9-figure valuations. So doing a little bit of everything, trying to learn something every day. Like you mentioned, I've been doing a lot of sailing and traveling, but for better or worse, the pandemic has made remote work very easy and more normal. So wherever I am, be it on a, on a boat in the Caribbean or in South America or Europe, I can actually just jump on and continue to work like nothing happened. So that's what I've been doing and it's been a great ride and a lot of fun. So. Trying to keep busyness level down, failing a little bit.

Yeah. When you said that you worked 18 hours, a lot of people say that, but you're actually one of the few people I know that to actually be true. Like you actually have this ability to sleep less than Joan or other people. Like you literally were like one call, another call, like, like some sort of Hollywood mogul from the '30s or something like that. Like living that year after year, it's pretty, your staying power is pretty amazing.

I never, I was never a good sleeper. I always thought that was one of my big advantages because I used to sleep 4 hours a night and just sort of be working the rest of the time. I did realize ultimately that I was destroying my health by doing that. It took me about 24 years to realize it. Now that I've gotten up to 6 hours a night and I'm feeling an awful lot better, I realized what I was doing to myself. So I'm going to try to preserve that 6 hours and not work the rest of the time. And a half, a couple hours a day does not work.

It's 7, 7.5 for me, 5 1.5-hour sleep cycles. And then, yeah, then I'm good. So, hey, so talking about cycles and on the hour, wow. As advertised, amazing journey so far, but still a very young and promising man. And you have many more adventures ahead of you that I look very much forward to chronicling and watching. And thanks a lot. It was great.

Well, thanks, Rich. You're as inspiring as ever. And thanks for having me on. I really appreciate the platform and love what you're doing with this thing. And I can't wait to see other guests that you have on because it's amazing stuff you're doing.

Thanks, buddy. That's great.

That's a wrap.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Rich Robinson Show. Season one at the speed of China. Visit therichrobinson.com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. Zaijian.

Cheers, y'all.