All week, I’ve been having conversations with some of the smartest people I know in this industry to talk about the state of the business, including R.J. Cutler, Lorenzo DiBonaventura and Colin Callender. These are people who have accomplished big things in their time and continue doing so, and who have, notably, built careers with longevity, and more importantly, have the ability to share their thoughts uncensored today.
My fourth maven is the prolific and Emmy-nominated producer, Sarah Schechter. Born in Boston in 1976, Schechter got her start working for Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where she worked with producer Barry Mendel on the Wes Anderson movies The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. In 2005, Schechter became an executive at Warner Bros., where she worked for years (notable projects include the Oscar-winning Her from Spike Jonze) until, in 2014, she was named president of Greg Berlanti’s production company, Berlanti Productions. In 2020, as Schechter had 17 scripted shows on the air simultaneously, she was promoted to partner and chair at Berlanti Productions.
But despite her success — or maybe as proof of her intellect about the industry — Schechter tells me she has some big concerns about the future of Hollywood. Not the audience, mind you — Berlanti Productions is responsible for several youth-skewing hits in recent years, including All-American, Riverdale and Red, White & Royal Blue — but the executives in charge. During our wide-ranging conversation below, Schechter talks to me about the “Baby Boomer mentality not to cede power” infecting studio leadership, the one thing streaming platforms haven’t solved in their quest to replace broadcast, how to keep production in L.A., and a list of threats closing in on us and what to do about them.
“The rank-and-file attitude has shifted from the idea that your career is made by the bets you take and the things you fight for,” she says below. “Now it’s more about keeping your job by not fighting for anything. No one wants to be on a limb in a business where executives don’t have contracts and job security.”
Now, here’s so much more of Schecter’s refreshingly uncensored truths about this business and ideas to fix it. Enjoy!
Richard Rushfield: So, Sarah, how do you think we’re doing?
Sarah Schechter: Not great. We’re in a transitional time, and we’ve been in them before, but never with as many threats simultaneously. It feels like we must persevere, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge that everything’s gotten a little bit harder. I studied film history and theory in college (at UC Santa Cruz), and learned a lot about Hollywood’s nervous breakdown. It feels like we might be in Hollywood’s panic attack.
What does dealing with this environment feel like for you, day to day? Can nobody make a decision? Are people running into walls and crashing golf carts all over the lots?
No one has golf carts anymore. It feels the same as before, but a Twilight Zone version of it, where you talk about everything for longer than you used to. It feels familiar, and I feel very fortunate to be as busy and creatively engaged as always. I feel a lot of gratitude for that. But it feels as though there’s more discussion without action than ever before.
Where are you right now on the optimism-to-pessimism scale?
By nature, I’m a bit of a pessimist. It could be just growing up on the East Coast — New England and New York City kind of do that to you. But I believe pessimism comes from paying attention and optimism comes from passion. There’s always optimism under pessimism and vice versa. So you have to acknowledge both. I’m trying to live in a very Zen-like state of acknowledging both, and you have to have faith that storytelling is a worthy and noble aim.
You talk about all the threats closing in on us at once. Can you list them in no particular order?
Well, there’s the cost of production, there’s the cost of marketing and there’s the exodus out of production in Los Angeles. There’s a downturn in the number of things being greenlit. So there are fewer opportunities for people. Then you have a lot of corporate focus on stock. I often think of Say Anything, about Ione Skye’s father in that (played by John Mahoney). Even though it turns out he’s a crook, he says, ‘Taking care of people isn’t a growth enterprise.’ The idea that film and television are meant to be a quarterly business is a lot of short-term thinking that hurts the long-term opportunities of this business, which has always been about building value through libraries, creativity, opportunities and chances. When everything is so short-sighted and so focused on the next stock report, there’s a lot of decision-making that doesn’t benefit the long-term growth of the business.
There’s also the threat to everyone’s attention. There’s YouTube, there’s TikTok, and now AI. It’s a little like the movie The Impossible, where before the tsunami, the water recedes — that’s AI. I’m an arts and literature kid, so I don’t fully understand or can’t quite contemplate the effects. But obviously it does feel as though the birds are flying off into the mountains, so something’s coming, and it’s coming quickly.
That’s a good list of problems.
It’s also like the morning after a bender. There’s a bit of a market correction, which is very tough for people, especially for people who are coming up. I do firmly believe that if you get to make things, you get better at making things and you learn how to solve problems. Many people aren’t being given enough opportunity to do that.
You’ve got your hands in a lot of different pieces of entertainment—big screen, small screen, different genres. Do these problems feel like they’re spread equally around?
Well, I’ll tell you that a little over 10 years ago, I took a job that was primarily focused on television, after spending my entire career in film. This was 2014, and so the first couple of years, people thought that I was crazy. By 2017, people were asking, ‘How do I get into TV?’ You don’t hear that anymore.
Has film stabilized as a place to work?
In a certain way, the consistency of film has meant that it has maintained a relatively steady heartbeat. Whereas I think television has gone through so many valleys, it’s a little like the heart monitor is all over the place.
Is there any part of the business where risks are being taken these days?
There are always wonderful risks taken in television and film. However, what’s always puzzling to me is that successful risks never serve as an example to continue taking risks, as if they’re always just seen as outliers.
