“I am a musician at heart; I love working with filmmakers to make art,” says Jay Roewe, HBO Senior VP and veteran of that company for 30 years. “But we live in a world now of ‘content.’ Our competition is YouTube. It's TikTok. You've got to lean into that, to be accepting of that.”
And that means staying ahead of the curve on multiple levels.
Roewe says every five years his job changes. And right now, the change is as big as that of silent to sound, radio to TV, and TV to cable.
“Right now I have to incorporate AI into my job. That landed hard for me at METALPALOOZA a couple of weeks ago. I've got to stay relevant, and I've got to go where the industry is going.”
Watch Jay Roewe at METAL
THE AMBASSADOR
A big part of Roewe’s work right now is negotiating favorable production deals with countries around the world to keep HBO’s hit machine profitable. His efforts have earned him the nickname “The Ambassador.”
“I talk to governments. This month it’s been France, Romania, Norway. They realize that bringing a show like White Lotus or Game of Thrones to their country is just great business. The government of Indonesia actually came and pitched us to shoot White Lotus in Indonesia. They came up with an eight million dollar package, though we went with Japan.”
A script, Roewe says, is a business proposal.
“We, the studio, might fund that proposal at $100 million dollars – which will employ hundreds, if not thousands, of people. We'll touch at least five hundred to a thousand different vendors and businesses in a city, state or country. So they want us. Around 2006, probably a quarter of our shows had incentives. Now 80-90% of our shows have an incentive of one kind or another.”
WHITE GUYS CAN’T PITCH
Another tough area to navigate is the changing ethnographic marketplace – perceived or real.
“I’ve known people who have been told point blank that their pitches wouldn’t be received because of their age and ethnicity – and those companies could be sued for being naive enough to even say that. And yes, there've been some lawsuits. Again, sometimes you have to pivot. I've told many of my friends: get outside of LA. We live in this little PC bubble here but people out there want to work with people from LA. I have friends who have sold multiple scripts abroad.”
WHEN I GROW UP…
A good ambassador understands realpolitik, even one who’s a musician at heart.
They may not like the ground they have to deal with, but they pay attention to trends and prepare for the future.
“I can explain the shift happening under my feet in two stories,” says Roewe. “When the people from Silicon Valley first came down to work with us, they said, ‘We can't wait to work here! You guys make the greatest content!’ And we were sitting there, thinking, ‘No. We make art. This content thing is about stuffing video through a pipe.’ Second story: recently, a 12-year-old came up to me in Colombia and says, “I want to be a content creator when I grow up!”
You might describe this shift as “Mr. Spielberg, say hello to Mr. Beast.”
“This is the world we're living in,” Ambassador Roewe concludes. “You’ve got to shift with the times.”
To learn more details about:
- Internal pressures and decisions at HBO.
- The new 750 million dollar California initiative to bring production back home.
- Immersive entertainment and the growing centrality of visual effects.
- What it's like filming in the very appropriately named Iceland.
- How Northern Ireland and Croatia snagged Game of Thrones.
- What countries and states offer the best production incentives.
- What TMZ actually stands for, and what’s up with Alaska.
- And overall, how to survive in the entertainment industry...
… watch the full interview here.
Written by Adam Gilad
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