The discussions in Bill Guttentag’s class can take dramatic turns. On a scale, some might say, of a galactic battle or two.
There was the day Star Wars director George Lucas debated with Nina Jacobson, former president of Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group. Or the time Ron Meyer, president and chief executive officer of Universal Studios, and director Alexander Payne, ’83, of Sideways and About Schmidt fame, traded views about what studio execs can and cannot contribute to a film.
“In a short period, students saw both sides of the coin,” says Guttentag, an Oscar- and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who invites Hollywood notables to speak to the 72 students enrolled in his course Working in the Film and Television Industries. “My pitch is that I have really smart students who are going to ask them really good questions, and they’ve never let me down.”
Guttentag was a Knight Fellow at Stanford during the 1998-99 academic year when he learned that Graduate School of Business professor Rod Kramer was showing students in his Power and Politics course clips of work Guttentag had produced and directed. The two met and decided to co-teach a GSB course that would focus on bringing leaders from the entertainment industry together with entrepreneurial students.
“We started with the idea that this is an enormously important industry,” Guttentag says. “The U.S. has a surplus balance of trade [in services] with every nation in the world, and we’re also exporting our values.”
Guttentag and Kramer lectured together for three years, but since 2004 the producer and director has been teaching on his own. “Stanford may now have the only business school in the country with an Oscar winner on its faculty,” says Kramer, who continues to drop by on a regular basis.
In fact, Guttentag has two Academy Awards for best documentary, short subjects. He won in 2003 for Twin Towers, about two brothers, a police officer and a firefighter, who were killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack. He also earned an Oscar in 1989 for You Don’t Have to Die, about a young boy with cancer. He created the NBC series Crime & Punishment, and won Emmys for HBO’s America Undercover and a CBS special.
Guttentag has a lot of friends in the industry—studio executives, producers, writers, directors and actors—who enjoy the occasional daylong visit to the Farm for lunch with graduate students and a subsequent grilling in class. “It’s fairly obvious what a writer does,” Guttentag acknowledges. “But lawyers, who make deals and help to sell films at Sundance [film festival], are less obvious.” He adds that students who are considering careers in the industry benefit from knowing the full scope of, say, Ron Meyer’s job—that he’s in charge of a physical plant and a theme park, in addition to running a studio.
Sometimes, the discussions can take a turn Guttentag hasn’t envisioned, like the day Sigourney Weaver, ’72, the star of Aliens and Tadpole, came to class. “She gave a great talk about the difference between movies where you pay her fee, and movies where she pays you to be in your movie.”
Guttentag notes that while a “sizeable percentage [of students] at the Business School are still going to Goldman Sachs, a lot are going to entrepreneurial things, especially in Silicon Valley.” What Hollywood offers is “an industry where risks are often rewarded, and people can rise quickly on the basis of a hit film or a good idea.”
Take his own film, Nanking, which premiered at Sundance this year. Dedicated to the late Iris Chang, author of the 1997 bestseller The Rape of Nanking, it documents the story of the Japanese army killing an estimated 300,000 Chinese during the 1937 invasion and occupation of Nanking. Guttentag, who co-directed and co-wrote the film, says it was made largely because AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis stepped up to write a check. “It’s a trend that’s happening in the film business, with people who’ve made money elsewhere getting into funding movies.”
What better place than business school, then, to explore the inner workings of the seventh art.
