DreamWorks Animation CEO Katzenberg offers advice

Mike Snider, USA TODAY | USATODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks, at the USA TODAY CEO Forum DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg talks about making animated movies before his appearance at the USA Today CEO forum at Syracuse University

Katzenberg tells how failure propelled his success

Move to Fox is aimed at developing new platforms

'Rise of the Guardians' is next film

SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Big green ogres and penguins aside, DreamWorks Animation is just hitting its stride, says studio co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.



Since its founding in 1994 by Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, DreamWorks has developed into an industry powerhouse to rival Pixar and Disney. Shrek 2 (2004) is the highest-grossing animated film of all time, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com. And DreamWorks holds six more slots in the top 20 animated films, including How To Train Your Dragon, Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, Kung Fu Panda and three more Shrek movies.

The average global box office per film for its latest releases is $550 million -- and that's before sales of DVDs and video on demand. Puss in Boots and Kung Fu Panda 2 grossed $1.2 billion globally last year, and both earned Oscar nominations for best animated film.

While far below a five-year high of $43.46 in February 2010, DreamWorks' stock has been on the rise recently. It closed at $20.83, up 5 cents — based on the early buzz for Rise of the Guardians, a 3-D animated fantasy adventure about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and other legendary figures who team up to fight evil. The film is due in theaters on Nov. 21.

Also stoking the stock: a new long-term distribution deal with Fox and an announced slate of 12 films in the next four years — a level of productivity that would surpass that of any previous animation studio. "We've built our company up to be able to reach that," Katzenberg, 61, said.

The studio executive toured his personal career path — touching on his involvement with animated films such as Shrek and (during his time at Disney) The Lion King — as part of the 14th USA TODAY CEO Forum, this one in conjunction with Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, The Office of Student Affairs and The Student Association here last week.

With an audience of 300 in the university's Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium — and hundreds more watching in overflow rooms — Katzenberg noted that he didn't really attend college. He registered for his first semester at New York University but skipped midterms to witness the city's 1971 police strike.

His involvement in politics led to a job as "a gopher," running errands for Paramount, where a producer witnessed his work ethic. "What I learned then … is give 110% of yourself at everything you do (and) no matter what the assignment is that somebody gives you, exceed their expectations just by some little amount."

Other tried-and-true tips that Katzenberg propped up with personal experiences: Don't take "no" for an answer; believe in yourself; get into the stream.

"What you want to try and do is head in the direction of something that interests you and excites you," he said. "If it's being a page at NBC, take it. It doesn't matter. Get in the stream. And then exceed. Whatever job you have, exceed the expectations of those that are doing it. These things will lead you to it."

Katzenberg sat for an hour-long interview with USA TODAY's Mike Snider, then took questions from students. "If I can somehow or another encourage a few kids out there today that their biggest dreams and future opportunities are out in our part of the world, it's a successful visit," he said.

The following excerpts from the conversation are edited for space and clarity.

Q: How does DreamWorks Animation stay on the cutting edge and push the technological envelope?

A: We're 2,400 people -- the largest animation company in the world, and about 350 of the people who work there — we consider them all artists — are actually in what we call animation technology. Everything from physicists to software programmers, computer engineers. How to Train Your Dragon director Dean DeBlois, as part of the story for dragon films he's working on right now, has dragons that go underwater and can breathe fire underwater. Someone from animation technology is going to figure out how that works. And they will. That's what's great. We can say to our storytellers, there's no limitation on your imagination. If you can dream it, we've got somebody who's going to figure out how make it happen.

Q: How has technology changed over the years?

A: An average animated movie has 130,000 frames. Each frame goes through 12 departments. And each frame can have as few as 10 iterations and as many as 100. If you do the math on that, it means, on average, most of our movies have between 3 billion and 4 billion iterations before there's a final movie. I have no idea how that gets organized or managed. It seems a completely impossible notion.

Q: Does cloud technology help with that?

A: In 2001 for the first Shrek, we had 5 million hours to render out (process the animated graphics for that film). Today on Rise of the Guardians, 11 years later, we have 75 million hours output a movie. It's not possible for us (to process) on our own campus — although we are one of the largest private computer centers in the world today. We realized this seven (or) eight years ago and started to go to remote sites in Santa Fe (N.M.), and Las Vegas and rendered it in the cloud.

Q: DreamWorks recently signed a new distribution deal with Fox . What does this mean for DreamWorks in the future?

A: We had a partnership for seven years with Paramount. We've had 13 movies. Every single one is a hit. Our move to Fox is really about what I hope is the next chapter for DreamWorks, which is the opportunity for us to become more of a family-branded entertainment company that has spread out into new opportunities, new businesses, new platforms. News Corp. has both the platform for us to do that and the ambition to do that.

Q: How has 3-D fared in theaters, and what trend is it on?

A: It's been a mixed bag. It kind of started at a pinnacle with the first movie we did, Monsters vs. Aliens, and later that year, 2009, Avatar. Unfortunately, there were a bunch of people that came along and said, we can make a fast buck by making cheap crap. And very quickly thereafter, a bunch of bad movies came out, and it was really damaging.Today, slowly, I think with Ridley Scott or Ang Lee or Spielberg (or) Marty Scorsese, you have great filmmakers now who are using it as a creative tool. And that is its greatest promise.

Q: How has streaming of movies affected Hollywood?

A: Right now, we're in this sort of period of transition into a digital world. I really do genuinely believe what will happen is that going to a movie theater is going to continue to migrate into higher and higher, and to more of a premium experience not unlike sports.

People are going to pay for what they watch by the inch. First of all, everything will become available within a very short window after that theatrical experience. Sports learned that it didn't matter, that these are not competitive experiences. People who want to go have a communal experience and want to be there in a big way. It's not competing with somebody that wants to the watch it, you know, on a BlackBerry.

Q: Pay by the inch? Please explain.

A: Here's what I mean. Take a movie like Madagascar 3. About 150 million people pay us about $10 from beginning to end on the movie. Some people go to the movie theater, some buy a DVD, some get it from HBO, some from Netflix, some from Redbox. But you sort of take it through the whole course, whole life of the movie, (it) is about 150 million people, and it's about $10, on an average.

Ten years from now, two and a half billion people are going to pay us, on average, $1.50. Literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people for 65 cents will watch it on a smartphone in all parts of the world. Then you'll pay $2 to watch it on your iPad. You'll pay $5 to watch it on a big high-def flat-screen TV, and you'll pay $15 to watch it in a premium movie theater, $25 to watch it in IMAX and $10 billion to watch it in Richard Branson's spaceship somewhere.

The one thing that the movie business has done, which is very different than music, is we have always made our product available to people in different shapes, different forms, different prices. You can own it, you can rent it, you can borrow it. Please don't steal it. Digital will move us to a mass, mass, mass market, radically different from what we have today. All the stakeholders will change in terms of what their stakes are.

Q: Would you change anything in your career?

A: I wish that my leaving Disney had not been as ugly and acrimonious as it was, but yet, on the other hand, DreamWorks exists because of it. So I would say I don't have those kinds of regrets.

On the economy:

"We have a ways to go. I think that it's hard to fathom the depth of how deep the hole is that we found ourselves in in 2007 and 2008. It's a challenging time for us. We are going to continue to be impacted by the challenges of Europe. I don't care who's sitting in the White House. We're going to find ourselves in a very slow recovery for the next four or five years. One of the things that I find most distressing here is what happens to kids coming out of school today and ... these kids coming out of the military today and the lack of opportunity for them. It's very concerning to me.

Most personal films he's been involved in:

-- "The Lion King is based on something that occurred to me in my life. When I look at it, I actually am looking at a reflection of something personally challenging, very hurtful, a moment in my life that was a great learning experience for me. Simba coming back to face Scar is an allegory for me.

-- I grew up across the street from the New York City Central Park Zoo. I went there as a kid and I thought, "God, these animals, they live on 5th Avenue. I wonder what would happen if they had to go to the wild?" Madagascar.

-- We made a movie called Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, which is one of (the studio's) least successful movies. But the character of Spirit is a character (that I) identify with. He was indomitable.

On being different from Disney:

When we started DreamWorks I said to Steven (Spielberg) and David (Geffen), "I don't want to make Disney movies, because that's their heritage. I want us to create our own." So we started experimenting. And then in 2001 the big green ogre visited us, and we went, "Ah, there's who we are." There's a movie that's irreverent and subversive, with big comedy stars in it. A bit more sophisticated, a PG movie, not a G movie, not Disney.

A few years later, this idea popped into my head. And I said, "DreamWorks makes movies for adults and the adult that exists in every child." So that's what we try to do.

On the power of technology:

Technology is literally democratizing the world, but it's also democratizing our world. Anybody can buy a camera.

I said to my son (David), who went to Boston University and is an aspiring film maker, "Go to the store, buy a camera, make a little film. You want to be a director, show them you can direct." And he did.

He made a little short film, 12 minutes long, called The Life and Times of RJ Berger, which then became a TV series for MTV Network for two years (The Hard Times of RJ Berger), and that literally sent him on his career — which I have had zero to do with.

I think the power of technology today has allowed the barriers to get lower and lower and lower in terms of both in animation and any kind of filmmaker today.