Lloyd Braun's colleagues have described him as "creatively reckless"--big on ideas but a little hard on the fine china. Before going to Yahoo, Braun created Grey's Anatomy, Lost, and Desperate Housewives for ABC, until his head-butting with Michael Eisner got him pushed out. Now he's the new honcho at Yahoo's Media Group, charged with inventing, as The New York Times put it, "a medium that unites the showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet." That means he'll be pushing tons of original content to the portal's 191 million users, priming the pump for video on demand. Braun has already lured several top network execs and moved his NoCal crew to Santa Monica. This fall, he tapped director Richard Bangs to produce an adventure series, starting with a grueling climb up the Eiger. Not a bad metaphor, actually.
Hollywood studios like Robert Rodriguez's math: Take a relatively small production budget (his first film, El Mariachi, cost $7,000; Sin City cost $45 million), run it through a digital camera, and out comes a whole lot of money--nearly $600 million to date. Rodriguez financed Mariachi by being a guinea pig in a drug trial, but those days are long gone. Now the man behind digital films like Desperado and the Spy Kids trilogy shoots under his Troublemaker Studio banner from his home in Austin. Rodriguez records his characters against a blue screen, later creating the entire "set" digitally, which frees him up to focus on the performance. He's already working on a prequel to Sin City (he's not above a little franchise building) and on a black-and-white feature called Grindhouse with Quentin Tarantino. Each director is making an hour-long segment, which will be packaged together and "made to look old," says Rodriguez. The film "will be sold as a double feature, like a night out at the movies, complete with trailers and film reels of movies that don't exist." We're betting that if Rodriguez can convert Tarantino, a longtime celluloid purist, to the digital faith, the rest of Hollywood can't be far behind.
More kids should make like Steven Soderbergh and just skip college. The director of sex, lies, and videotape and Traffic is emerging as one of cinema's most conspicuous innovators (see "Maverick Mogul," page 70). His upcoming Bubble, a murder mystery shot on high-definition video cameras along the Ohio-West Virginia border, will show up simultaneously in January in theaters, on DVD, and on TV--a direct slap at industry practice--and uses no actors, only locals. Soderbergh may be philosophically opposed to studio meddling, but he's keeping his options open: He has more than a dozen films in various stages of production within the studio system, including Che, starring Benicio Del Toro. Give that man a diploma.
Anne Sweeney is no stranger to magazine power lists. As president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, she's redefining what it means to watch TV. But she wields her influence discreetly. When her boss, Bob Iger, took the credit for the new video-iPod coup (and chummed it up with Steve Jobs at the unveiling), Sweeney, one of the architects of the deal (it'll make ABC hits available to iPod users starting in October), stayed in the background. And when Disney took a shot from the guilds about residuals, Sweeney took the bullet and defended the move--no surprise from a woman who once gave an ad exec a Kevlar vest during a particularly rocky period. Before Disney, Sweeney earned a reputation as a turnaround artist at Nickelodeon and FX. She tends to hire creative people and let them do their thing. And that seems to be paying off just fine: Disney posted a record $998 million profit for the third quarter of 2005. She won't be needing a vest anytime soon.
Blair Westlake joined Microsoft in 2004 after the software giant realized it had to lay a little sugar on Hollywood if gizmos such as its Media Center and Xbox 360 were ever going to make it as movie platforms. Who better to sweeten the pot, after all, than the former head of Universal Studios' television division? Now, with the living room overwhelming the theater as the venue of choice for inert Americans--and with Microsoft establishing the PC as a living-room fixture--the forces are aligning (scarily) behind the cattle from Seattle. Media and tech convergence VP Westlake has already greased the works by backing the studios on intellectual-property protection. That should buy the company plenty of goodwill if and when Hollywood builds out its own home-distribution pipeline. Bill Gates must be on the edge of his seat.
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